Quote

I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as different as Borges and Walter Benjamin, Novalis and Godard.

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
Noticed
Fascinated
Lists
Different
Godard
People
Borges
Benjamin
Walter
Quotations

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
Susan Sontag
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When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.
Susan Sontag
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What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up
Susan Sontag
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When you are writing, you are - from society's point of view - only producing the first version which will then be processed and recycled.
Susan Sontag
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Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.
Susan Sontag
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There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
Susan Sontag
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All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.
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.
Susan Sontag
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Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.
Susan Sontag
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Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have even joined).
Susan Sontag
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Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art
Susan Sontag
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I want to save my soul, that timid wind.
Susan Sontag
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You can always be quoted.
Susan Sontag
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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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The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer.
Susan Sontag
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Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.
Susan Sontag
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Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.
Susan Sontag
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The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.
Susan Sontag