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"Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize."
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"Not everyone who loves music can play the tune."

"It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists."

"The movies remind me of the Triangle Club at Princeton. I used to belong to it, and we always started out firm in our decision to create new and startling things. We always ended up by producing the same old show. In the beginning, our enthusiasm and ideals discarded as rubbish all the old fossilized plots."

"A stone is ingrained with geological and historical memories."

"Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art."

"Art is something that opens up and enhances your emotions and that's what I like to think I'm doing."

"The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity."
Explore more quotes by Susan Sontag


"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."


"To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That's what lasts. That's what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better."


"A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter."


"With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - like most historical evidence."


"I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path."


"All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds."


"Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing " which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power."


"So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful."


"Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone."
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