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I don’t write because there’s an audience. I write because there is literature.

Susan Sontag

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
SUSAN SONTAG

Action Compassion Need
To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing – a hand worker in an era of mass production.
SUSAN SONTAG

Artist Hands Writing
Sanity is a cozy lie.
SUSAN SONTAG

Comfortable Lie One Liner Sanity
Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.
SUSAN SONTAG

Ability Exercise Literature
In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
SUSAN SONTAG

Art Need Place
It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.
SUSAN SONTAG

Change Easy Endurance
In ‘life,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In ‘work,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my life.
SUSAN SONTAG

Job Life Myself Poet Writing
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 SONTAG

Death Painting Photography Reality
No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.
SUSAN SONTAG

Pain People
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
SUSAN SONTAG

Pain Photography
Art is a form of consciousness.
SUSAN SONTAG

Art Consciousness One Liner
I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.
SUSAN SONTAG

Encouragement Inspirational Life
Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
SUSAN SONTAG

Book End Photography
All my life I’ve been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.
SUSAN SONTAG

Intelligent Life Talk
To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
SUSAN SONTAG

Sage Thinking Time
Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.
SUSAN SONTAG

Disease Fear Sexuality

I don’t write because there’s an audience. I write because there is literature.

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I don’t write because there’s an audience. I write because there is literature.

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Popular Authors

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