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.


Susan Sontag

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The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own exper...
SUSAN SONTAG
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art / and, by analogy, our own exper...
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It is what it is, it is what you make it.
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I regret that I wasn't more successful with my marriages, but it is what it is.
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With '10,000,' our aim was to make a film that was entertaining and a roller-coaster ride; i...
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Unpredictability means what it means. I don't know how you define it. It is what it is.
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It is what it is, and it ain't nothin' else... Everything is clearly, openly, plainly delive...
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I saw that there is no Nature,
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See the world for what it is.
BEAUTIFUL!
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To stand on the
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Things don’t have significance: they only have existence.
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To be honest, there are no problems between me and Messi. People have their own opinions about who t...
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Tell your story to the universe and Let your actions speak LOVE.' No matter what it is.
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I’m glad I see with my eyes and not the pages I’ve read.
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What is it that makes you so angry, bothers you so deeply, that you're compelled to act?
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I am Happy and satisfied with what I am. 10000 will take me wrong, 1000 will go against me, 100 will...
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If our mind was an ocean then every now and then we would have the perfect storm happening in it.Gar...
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The man stopped talking and was looking at the sunset.
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The Madden Curse has really taken on a life of its own. People just love talking about it, and it is...
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I'm probably the least harsh on myself, and I try not to scrutinize everything about my body. As...
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It is a lie.
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If I knew I was going to die tomorrow,
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Between what i see in a field and what I see in another field
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It’s an already inside outside,
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Let your actions speak LOVE. No matter what it is.
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Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it
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What comes, when it comes, will be what it is.
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Night doesn’t fall for my eyes
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I’m in no hurry: the sun and the moon aren’t, either.
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I'm not sure what the future holds but I do know that I'm going to be positive and not wake ...
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Accept the universe
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If the gods wanted to give you something e...
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... it is certain that the real function of art is to increase our self-consciousness; to make us mo...
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Life is weird and wonderful like that, is it not.
SONYA.E.WILLIAMS
Ques eso? Queso?
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Sheep don’t need the shepherd to be what they are. The shepherd needs sheep to be what he is.
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I'm one of my sensations.
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He had a harder time helping her out though. He was asleep while she was doing stars. Without wings,...
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Integrity is not everything, but it is the only thing that matters.
JEFFREY FRY
Human is what he decides to be.
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The king may rule the kingdom, but it's the queen who moves the board.
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There was no Jace Wayland more real than the one he saw in her eyes when she looked at him.
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I speak the truth. Not everyone who says they are ready to hear it really are.
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It is better to be a pragmatist than a lunatic.
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How to get it, I annoy you???
You are not interested???

What's the idea???
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But what you’re calling poetry is what everything is. It’s not even poetry — it’s seeing. Th...
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When push comes to shove would people do what they felt was right, to get justice done or would they...
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There's no more film. Film is gone. We photograph digitally and electronically. We don't rea...
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The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think -- rather to impr...
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More important, it's because God is our only true source of life.
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We all are wearing many hundred glasses of different colors. Therefore, everyone sees the world in d...
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If it's about what I like, I like opera as a music and deathstep and dubstep.
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Next generations will not know what is to have childhood.
DANIEL MELGAçO
I want to be honest, and even if that's scary, I know it's worth it.
EMM GRYNER
Tomorrow is promised to no one. Prioritize today accordingly.
GINA GREENLEE
Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forc...
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Thought is more important than art. . . . To revere art and have no understanding of the process tha...
IMAMU AMIRI BARAKA
After all, what is art? Art is the creative process and it goes through all fields. Einstein’s the...
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it's always important to do what you want, Life is too short to live with Regrets.
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I'm not an Emontional, but how???
I live with the thought that "Nothing can be returned, it has...
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When you give, you will be blessed. When you give, it will be given back to you.
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Supposedly, going to war initiates you into this gnostic priesthood of people who've had a limin...
PHIL KLAY
Empathy is the new measurement of everything. It doesn't matter what religion you have, what God you...
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The giant white cube is now impeding rather than enhancing the rhythms of art. It preprograms a view...
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I'd much rather go to a Banksy art show than a Moby art show. My art is painfully naive.
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To find why that happen and why this is happening, you should start from the beginning the problem c...
DEYTH BANGER
The art of the police is not to see what it is useless that it should see.
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

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Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the ra...
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Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading towa...
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The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.
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Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The questio...
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A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world."

[Speech upon being awa...
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Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
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Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more ...
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It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, preciou...
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Unfortunately, moral beauty in art -- like physical beauty in a person -- is extremely perishable. I...
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Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, e...
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The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.
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The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
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It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph -- only less inter...
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In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents ...
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The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontroll...
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The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec...
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Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
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Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be ...
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With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the char...
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The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty -- of the indefinite expansion ...
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Perversity is the muse of modern literature.
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Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ...
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Ambition if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
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In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.
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A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains o...
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Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest sub...
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What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
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What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a full hu...
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Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative...
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I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
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Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in ou...
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Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. It is love of the...
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Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of men...
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Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms,...
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We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting...
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AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It ...
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AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder...
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Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
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Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone n...
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What we need is to use what we have.
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Sanity is a cozy lie.
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It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.
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In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized,...
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The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and...
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Taste has no system and no proofs.
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The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture...
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One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves....
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What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women...
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The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking o...
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Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.
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Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
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The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
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I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
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The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
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Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
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Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists...
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Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
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Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminenc...
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Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past...
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My library is an archive of longings.
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Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after yea...
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I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams
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I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really h...
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Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and p...
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Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on va...
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The standard that a society should actually embody its own professed principles is a utopian one, in...
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'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love o...
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It is not the position, but the disposition.
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The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions
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Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by...
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To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Pre...
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Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.
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Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.
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Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
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Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citiz...
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Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject. . . . [...
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People don't become inured to what they are shown - if that's the right way to describe what happens...
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So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympath...
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Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever.

Photographs ar...
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Desire has no history...
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Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism...
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Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality...One can't possess reality, one can possess images--on...
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Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics...
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Every culture has its southerners -- people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, dri...
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How much self-love comes in the guise of selfless devotion!
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As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel...
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Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the ...
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I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.
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Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen c...
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[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.
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Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehe...
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Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the nineteenth century's surrogate fo...
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Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
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Perhaps it is our perennial fate to be surprised by the simultaneity of events, by the sheer extensi...
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Rules of taste enforce structures of power.
SUSAN SONTAG
Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth read...
SUSAN SONTAG
All photographs are memento mori.
SUSAN SONTAG
With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the char...
SUSAN SONTAG
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art / and, by analogy, our own exper...
SUSAN SONTAG
The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual dis...
SUSAN SONTAG
Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize,
SUSAN SONTAG
Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminenc...
SUSAN SONTAG
This city is neither a jungle nor the moon. . . . In long shot: a cosmic smudge, a conglomerate of b...
SUSAN SONTAG
The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec...
SUSAN SONTAG
It's fantastic knowing you're going to die; it really makes having priorities and trying to follow t...
SUSAN SONTAG
A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is ...
SUSAN SONTAG
The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged,...
SUSAN SONTAG
The Way We Live Now
SUSAN SONTAG
Of course the movies are going to be the more visible, more high profile, for the simple reason that...
SUSAN SONTAG
In the final analysis, ''style'' is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of styli...
SUSAN SONTAG
He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.
SUSAN SONTAG
With more people, there are more voices to tune out.
SUSAN SONTAG
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
SUSAN SONTAG
Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its "vi...
SUSAN SONTAG
Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to det...
SUSAN SONTAG
The aestheticizing tendency of photography is such that the medium which conveys distress ends by ne...
SUSAN SONTAG
It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along... The very activity of taking...
SUSAN SONTAG
But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybo...
SUSAN SONTAG
Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled re...
SUSAN SONTAG
It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other pe...
SUSAN SONTAG
One feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else. The na...
SUSAN SONTAG
The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations...
SUSAN SONTAG
[Perhaps this is a good thing. And potentially dangerous for a novelist. The dangers are obvious. A ...
SUSAN SONTAG
Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ...
SUSAN SONTAG
The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste...
SUSAN SONTAG
Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.
SUSAN SONTAG
Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in ou...
SUSAN SONTAG
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women...
SUSAN SONTAG
Perversity is the muse of modern literature
SUSAN SONTAG
What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual ...
SUSAN SONTAG
It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, preciou...
SUSAN SONTAG
My idea of a writer: someone interested in 'everything,'
SUSAN SONTAG
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them
SUSAN SONTAG
The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth. . . the pollution of...
SUSAN SONTAG
Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.
SUSAN SONTAG
A great private collection is a material concentrate that continually stimulates, that overexcites. ...
SUSAN SONTAG