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Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.
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
Essays
Uses
Worried
Serve
Gone
Use
Writing
Exuberance
Essay
More quotes by Susan Sontag
Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
Susan Sontag
We are told we must choose - the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?
Susan Sontag
The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.
Susan Sontag
One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most people - given that sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not.
Susan Sontag
To camp is a mode of seduction... Behind the 'straight' public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing.
Susan Sontag
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
Susan Sontag
Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
Susan Sontag
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
In a lot of writing or intellectual discourse we're starting to use that model: Oh, this is where it comes from! I would like to concentrate on work which is more resistant to that procedure, as I think fiction is.
Susan Sontag
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.
Susan Sontag
You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it.
Susan Sontag
The fear of AIDS imposes on an act whose ideal is an experience of pure presentness (and a creation of the future) a relation to the past to be ignored at one's peril. Sex no longer withdraws its partners, if only for a moment, from the social. It cannot be considered just a coupling it is a chain, a chain of transmission, from the past.
Susan Sontag
While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.
Susan Sontag
In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.
Susan Sontag
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
Susan Sontag
The white race is the cancer of human history it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.
Susan Sontag
A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.
Susan Sontag
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.
Susan Sontag
Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.
Susan Sontag
I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
Susan Sontag
