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We live in a world of copies and we're fascinated when we encounter the originals (in a museum, for instance).

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
Museums
Copies
Encounters
Fascinated
Originals
Instance
Live
Museum
World
Encounter

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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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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Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is sexier than communism.
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Cancer is a demonic pregnancy.
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The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.
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The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to the serious. One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
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Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.
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One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith.
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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.
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The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality.
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I didn't think of myself as importing, I thought it was more interesting to write about things people didn't know about than what they did. When I became aware that I was in fact importing, I stopped doing it.
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One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.
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War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.
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To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.
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art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.
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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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To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
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Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
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In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person I create myself.
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Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.
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The only interesting ideas are heresies
Susan Sontag