Top 50 Susan Sontag Quotes for Cultural Critique

“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”

— Susan Sontag

“Interpretation does not, of course, always prevail.”

— Susan Sontag

“The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.”

— Susan Sontag

“Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.”

— Susan Sontag

“To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world.”

— Susan Sontag

“Interpretation is the intellect’s revenge upon art.”

— Susan Sontag

“In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”

— Susan Sontag

“An interpretation is not an excavation of fault or truth but a re-envisioning.”

— Susan Sontag

“The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”

— Susan Sontag

“Art is not only about something; it is something.”

— Susan Sontag

“I write to define myself — an act of self-creation — part of growing up, as with all writers.”

— Susan Sontag

“The truth is balance. However, the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.”

— Susan Sontag

“The only interesting ideas are heresies.”

— Susan Sontag

“I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.”

— Susan Sontag

“Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.”

— Susan Sontag

“The wisdom that becomes available over a profound, long engagement with writing is immeasurable.”

— Susan Sontag

‘What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.’

— Susan Sontag

“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.”

— Susan Sontag

“Knowledge is inextricably linked with power and the value of knowledge enhances when it is shared.”

— Susan Sontag

“Literature is writing that returns you to life more than you had expected.”

— Susan Sontag

“Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality.”

— Susan Sontag

“To collect photographs is to collect the world.”

— Susan Sontag

“Each still photograph is a privileged moment turned into a slim object that can be possessed.”

— Susan Sontag

“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.”

— Susan Sontag

“A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened.”

— Susan Sontag

“The photographer is supertourist, an extension of the anthropologist, visiting natives and bringing back news of their exotic doings and strange gear.”

— Susan Sontag

“Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it.”

— Susan Sontag

“There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.”

— Susan Sontag

“Taking photographs is a way of refusing to experience it.”

— Susan Sontag

“The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.”

— Susan Sontag

“The life of the creative man is led, directed, and controlled by boredom.”

— Susan Sontag

“Sanity is a cozy lie.”

— Susan Sontag

“One can never be alone enough to write. To see better.”

— Susan Sontag

“The white race is the cancer of human history.”

— Susan Sontag

“All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.”

— Susan Sontag

“Rules of taste enforce structures of power.”

— Susan Sontag

“The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects — making it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.”

— Susan Sontag

“Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.”

— Susan Sontag

“To be able to devote one’s life to art without forgetting that art is frivolous is a tremendous achievement of personal character.”

— Susan Sontag

“The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.”

— Susan Sontag

“Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.”

— Susan Sontag

“The aesthetic is itself a function of the critical.”

— Susan Sontag

“In the final analysis, style is art.”

— Susan Sontag

“The camera’s rendering of reality must always hide more than it discloses.”

— Susan Sontag

“Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.”

— Susan Sontag

“Fictionalizing means thinking about real things as if they were not real.”

— Susan Sontag

“Beauty is a promise of happiness, not happiness itself.”

— Susan Sontag

“Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.”

— Susan Sontag

“Art is seduction, not rape.”

— Susan Sontag

“A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.”

— Susan Sontag