"In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret."
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Quote collection
Susan Sontag quotes (page 14 of 27)
540 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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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"There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work."
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"All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation."
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"Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past."
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"The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth... the pollution of American space, with gadgetry and cars and TV and box architecture, brutalizes the senses, making gray neurotics of most of us, and perverse spiritual athletes and strident self-transcenders of the best of us."
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"The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie."
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"The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations."
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"If within the last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be invested with an unprecedented stature - the nearest thing to a sacramental human activity acknowledged by secular society - it is because one of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what's there."
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"I can't say I know how to change the society, but I share the feeling that this society is full of technology which depersonalizes people, which seems to drain a sense of reality from our lives. It's full of a lot of other things too."
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"Most writers I know have switched to word processors. I haven't but I'm very curious about why people like it so much. I think it has something to do with the fact that at last writing, which has been such an old-fashioned, artisanal activity, even on a typewriter, has now entered the central domain of modern experience which is that of making copies, being involved in the world of duplicates and machine-mediated activities."
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"I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don't consider it a moral virtue."
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"Quotation is a method of appropriation which is invincible, I think. It's not a procedure which displeases me, contrary to recycling."
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"There are some elements in life - above all, sexual pleasure - about which it isn't necessary to have a position."
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"Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing."
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"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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"On the level of simple sensation and mood, making love surely resembles an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone."
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"All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here."
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"Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead."
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"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."
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