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"A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning."
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Exlpore more Fiction quotes
"Villainessa Tittel was a hired killer, an assassin by trade. She had enjoyed the best education and had been trained by assassins who had (until then at least) been considered the best in the business. She had turned to 'cleaning' as an occupation because she really enjoyed endings more than beginnings " and anyway, she didn't need to know her mark's entire pedigree or life's story, or to have some kind of facetious moral justification just to collect her fee. Unsurprisingly, when she did read " on those rare occasions " her books were always dog-eared from the back."
"Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction."
"I got nice rejections explaining that historical fiction was a difficult sell. But I kept trying."
"Ripley is married. And he's not lost. He has his feet on the ground."
"But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel...it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended."
"In camp was found a book, the first of the kind I had ever seen, in which I was made a great hero, slaying Indians by the hundreds."
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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