"One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith."
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Quote collection
Susan Sontag quotes (page 26 of 27)
540 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Loeb has been doing wonderfully patient work, exploring the American conscience from the inside. I regard him as something of a national treasure."
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"Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility . . . . Artists have had to become self-conscious aestheticians: continually challenging their means, their materials and methods."
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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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"I write - and talk - in order to find out what I think."
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"Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world."
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"You can always be quoted."
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"I'm extremely interested in the Russian formalists and have been for many years. I'm more drawn to their writing, which is expressive and literary, than to writing which is extremely academic or jargon-ridden."
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"I think part of the success which Structuralist or post-Structuralist thought in critical theory has had in literary studies in American universities is due to a theoretical vacuum."
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"When you are writing, you are - from society's point of view - only producing the first version which will then be processed and recycled."
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"In a lot of writing or intellectual discourse we're starting to use that model: "Oh, this is where it comes from!" I would like to concentrate on work which is more resistant to that procedure, as I think fiction is."
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"Using quotations was at first quite spontaneous for me, but then this use became strengthened through reflection. But originally this practice came out of temperament."
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"Ultimately ideas come out of a temperament or a sensibility, they are a crystallization or a precipitation of temperament."
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"The writers or artists I write about are not necessarily those I care most about (Shakespeare is still my favourite writer) but those whose work I feel has been neglected."
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"I didn't think of myself as importing, I thought it was more interesting to write about things people didn't know about than what they did. When I became aware that I was in fact "importing", I stopped doing it."
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"Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have even joined)."
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"When you see your 40-page essay turned into a "hot tip" in one paragraph in Newsweek, you get anxious about the way your writing has been used."
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"I'm interested in the possibility of fiction which straddles narrative and essay."
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"It's not that you make up your ideas to justify your temperament but that it's the temperament first."
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"The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality."
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