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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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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
Criticism
Schemes
Based
Arrangements
Violates
Theory
Articles
Dubious
Use
Categories
Arrangement
Makes
Interpretation
Scheme
Art
Highly
Article
Work
Content
Composed
Mental
Items

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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When something is just bad, it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish.
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I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response. But when I write, I'm very uncertain whether it's good enough. That is, of course, the writer's agony.
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To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content.
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Loeb has been doing wonderfully patient work, exploring the American conscience from the inside. I regard him as something of a national treasure.
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Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world
Susan Sontag
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This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.
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Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.
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War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.
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What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.
Susan Sontag
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Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
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A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness.
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What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.
Susan Sontag
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Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.
Susan Sontag
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Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
Susan Sontag
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Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures
Susan Sontag
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Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.
Susan Sontag
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Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
Susan Sontag
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All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.
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Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.
Susan Sontag
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Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.
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