A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.
SUSAN SONTAGTo be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing – a hand worker in an era of mass production.
More Susan Sontag Quotes
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Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.
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It hurts to love. It’s like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.
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A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
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Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.
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The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.
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One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.
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Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.
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Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it’s the secret to good sex.
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Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
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To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
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To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing – a hand worker in an era of mass production.
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Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.
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Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was ‘interesting’.
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Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.
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In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
SUSAN SONTAG






