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That sort of reception - where everything is assimilated to the world of celebrity - makes me dream of becoming a more recalcitrant, harder to assimilate writer.

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
Harder
Writer
Becoming
Sort
Recalcitrant
Makes
Assimilated
Dream
Assimilate
Everything
Reception
World
Celebrity

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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Everything has changed and nothing is changed.
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Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
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If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
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To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.
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Intelligence is not necessarily a good thing, something to value or cultivate. It's more like a fifth wheel - necessary or desirable when things break down. When things go well, it's better to be stupid ... Stupidity is as much a value as intelligence.
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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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With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.
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Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.
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The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.
Susan Sontag
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It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.
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The solution to a problem - a story that you are unable to finish - is the problem. It isn't as if the problem is one thing and the solution something else. The problem, properly understood = the solution. Instead of trying to hide or efface what limits the story, capitalize on that very limitation. State it, rail against it.
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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.
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I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
Susan Sontag
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Art is a form of consciousness.
Susan Sontag
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What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
Susan Sontag
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I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive.
Susan Sontag
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Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
Susan Sontag
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The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.
Susan Sontag
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whatever doesn't kill you leaves scars.
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writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.
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