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Ultimately ideas come out of a temperament or a sensibility, they are a crystallization or a precipitation of temperament.

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
Come
Precipitation
Crystallization
Temperament
Sensibility
Ultimately
Ideas

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.
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And what do I mean by the word 'perfection'? That I shall not try to explain but only say, 'Perfection makes me laugh.' Not cynically, I hasten to add, 'With joy.
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Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead.
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Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
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There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.
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The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
Susan Sontag
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Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.
Susan Sontag
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That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.
Susan Sontag
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Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.
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My skull is crammed with quotations.
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Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.
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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.
Susan Sontag
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All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.
Susan Sontag
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Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as a fantasy when it is not our own.
Susan Sontag
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I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all
Susan Sontag
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Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.
Susan Sontag
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We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.
Susan Sontag
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Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
Susan Sontag
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The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
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