Susan Sontag Quotes
Susan Sontag Quotes
- 1
A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.
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- 2
AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.
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- 3
Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
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- 4
Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
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- 5
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
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- 6
Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
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- 7
As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
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- 8
Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.
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- 9
Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.
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- 10
"Camp" is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.
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- 11
Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.
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- 12
For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.
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- 13
I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.
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- 14
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
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- 15
In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.
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- 16
Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
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- 17
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
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- 18
It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.
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- 19
Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
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- 20
Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
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- 21
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.
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- 22
Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.
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- 23
My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.
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- 24
Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.
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- 25
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
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- 26
So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.
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- 27
Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.
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- 28
Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.
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- 29
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
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- 30
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
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- 31
The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.
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- 32
The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.
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- 33
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
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- 34
The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.
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- 35
The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
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- 36
The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
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- 37
Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.
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- 38
What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
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- 39
What we need is to use what we have.
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