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I'm not interested in giving aid and comfort to the neo­-Conservatives.

Susan Sontag

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Susan Sontag
Age: 71 †
Born: 1933
Born: January 16
Died: 2004
Died: December 28
Author
Essayist
Feminist
Film Critic
Film Director
Historian
Human Rights Activist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
New York City
New York
Susan Rosenblatt
Conservatives
Aids
Comfort
Interested
Giving

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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Writing is a mysterious activity.
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The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.
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To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
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Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions.
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...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier and when the poet self dies, the person dies.
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Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
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Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.
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Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.
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The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
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When something is just bad, it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish.
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How boring just to be a body.
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I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't.
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Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.
Susan Sontag
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Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.
Susan Sontag
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Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail.
Susan Sontag
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Loeb has been doing wonderfully patient work, exploring the American conscience from the inside. I regard him as something of a national treasure.
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I feel that I've had enough theoretical speculation to last me a lifetime.
Susan Sontag
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What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment and the quotation is one kind of fragment.
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taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
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Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.
Susan Sontag