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"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."
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"The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science."
"Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding."
"As useful as an unhappy artist. As useless as a happy philosopher."
"You do not need a boyfriend or a girlfriend to write an emotional poet, because poetry is beyond hooks and holes."
"To see things as the poet sees them I must share his consciousness and not attend to it; I must look where he looks and not turn round to face him; I must make of him not a spectacle but a pair of spectacles; in fine, as Professor Alexander would say, I must enjoy him and not contemplate him."
Explore more quotes by Susan Sontag
"Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt."
"Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone."
"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."
"Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims."
"Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one."
"I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future."
"As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure."
"This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself - albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job."
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