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
Shadow
Upon
Deplete
Art
Impoverish
Order
Meanings
Even
Interpret
World
Interpretation
Revenge
Intellect

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.
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By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.
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Ideas disturb the levelness of life
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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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She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again - and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies.
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Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.
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The only interesting ideas are heresies
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Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
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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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A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.
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Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
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I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.
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I want to save my soul, that timid wind.
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The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.
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People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.
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Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are
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Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.
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Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
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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.
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I love to read the way people love to watch television.
Susan Sontag