Quotes by Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag

American writer, filmmaker, teacher, and political activist

Lived from: 1933 - 2004

Category: Politics | Writers (Contemporary) Country: FlagUnited States

Born: 16 january 1933 Died: 28 december 2004

Quotes 21 till 40 of 59.

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  • Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people.
    ― Susan Sontag
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  • I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.
    ― Susan Sontag
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  • I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
    ― Susan Sontag
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  • In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
    ― Susan Sontag
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  • In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.
    ― Susan Sontag
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  • In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.
    ― Susan Sontag
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  • In the final analysis, ''style'' is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.
    ― Susan Sontag
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  • Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of ''meanings.''
    ― Susan Sontag
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  • 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.
    ― Susan Sontag
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  • It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.
    ― Susan Sontag
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  • It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making.
    ― Susan Sontag
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  • It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe - though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived.
    ― Susan Sontag
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  • Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
    ― Susan Sontag
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  • Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.
    ― Susan Sontag
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  • Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.
    ― Susan Sontag
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  • Perversity is the muse of modern literature.
    ― Susan Sontag
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  • Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
    ― Susan Sontag
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  • Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
    ― Susan Sontag
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  • Taste has no system and no proofs.
    ― 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 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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