Quote

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of ''meanings.''

Susan Sontag

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Susan Sontag
Age: 71 †
Born: 1933
Born: January 16
Died: 2004
Died: December 28
Author
Essayist
Feminist
Film Critic
Film Director
Historian
Human Rights Activist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
New York City
New York
Susan Rosenblatt
Upon
Deplete
Art
Impoverish
Order
Meanings
Even
Interpret
World
Interpretation
Revenge
Intellect
Shadow

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.
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Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.
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Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.
Susan Sontag
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Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.
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Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.
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In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences.
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One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.
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I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
Susan Sontag
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Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
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I want to save my soul, that timid wind.
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I have been told that I am a natural feminist, someone who was born a feminist. In fact I was quite blind to what the problem was: I couldn't understand why anyone would hesitate to do what they wanted to do just because they were told that women didn't do such things.
Susan Sontag
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The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.
Susan Sontag
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The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.
Susan Sontag
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Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
Susan Sontag
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While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.
Susan Sontag
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Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.
Susan Sontag
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Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
Susan Sontag
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We live in a world of copies and we're fascinated when we encounter the originals (in a museum, for instance).
Susan Sontag
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The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.
Susan Sontag
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Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
Susan Sontag