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

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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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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And what do I mean by the word 'perfection'? That I shall not try to explain but only say, 'Perfection makes me laugh.' Not cynically, I hasten to add, 'With joy.
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The way in which a certain kind of political idealism has been discredited and scorned makes the danger not that intellectuals keep on making fools of themselves, formulating political opinions when they might not be as informed as they might be, but that they retreat and leave politics to the professionals.
Susan Sontag
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Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.
Susan Sontag
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Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
Susan Sontag
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One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much.
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whatever doesn't kill you leaves scars.
Susan Sontag
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Total experiences, of which there are many kinds, tend again and again to be apprehended only as revivals or translations of the religious imagination. To try to make a fresh way of talking at the most serious, ardent, and enthusiastic level, heading off the religious encapsulation, is one of the primary intellectual tasks of future thought.
Susan Sontag
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One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith.
Susan Sontag
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The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders.
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A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.
Susan Sontag
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Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
Susan Sontag
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What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment and the quotation is one kind of fragment.
Susan Sontag
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Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.
Susan Sontag
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Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
Susan Sontag
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I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all
Susan Sontag
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Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.
Susan Sontag
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A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.
Susan Sontag
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In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.
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It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.
Susan Sontag