Quote

In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

Susan Sontag

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Culture
Interpretation
Art
Revenge
Intellect
Dilemma
Criticism
Sensual
Whose
Expense
Already
Capability
Upon
Classical
Energy
Expenses

More quotes by Susan Sontag

Image
I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
Susan Sontag
Image
What we need is to use what we have.
Susan Sontag
Image
To camp is a mode of seduction... Behind the 'straight' public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing.
Susan Sontag
Image
The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.
Susan Sontag
Image
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
Image
The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders.
Susan Sontag
Image
Shouting has never made me understand anything.
Susan Sontag
Image
Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.
Susan Sontag
Image
writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.
Susan Sontag
Image
A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.
Susan Sontag
Image
When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.
Susan Sontag
Image
Now the new things happening in France don't interest me.
Susan Sontag
Image
The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.
Susan Sontag
Image
What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up
Susan Sontag
Image
Rules of taste enforce structures of power.
Susan Sontag
Image
Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.
Susan Sontag
Image
Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.
Susan Sontag
Image
As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
Susan Sontag
Image
An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.
Susan Sontag
Image
...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier and when the poet self dies, the person dies.
Susan Sontag