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"My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am."
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"What can you do to ensure that your voice value translates into impression value?"

"Art is a distinct form of human communication. Art interprets experience, sensation, and feelings. An artistic work translates our mental images and allows other people to understand what we feel; art conveys our happiness, sadness, hopes, doubts, anxieties, fears, desires, and ineffable longings."

"Heaven resonates when one sings wholeheartedly."

"You won't write, won't ya??I just focus on the negative!"

"There are things known-things experienced, felt, and understood-that words hold no power to convey. Attempting to do so only dilutes their substance and does them injustice."

"If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you're a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act-truth is always subversive."

"In a man's letters his soul lies naked."

"Life is a sacred story."

"Music is much like fucking, but some composers can't climax and others climax too often, leaving themselves and the listener jaded and spent."
Explore more quotes by Susan Sontag

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

"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."

"The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication."

"Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art."

"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."

"The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste."

"What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine."

"The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means."

"It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones."
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