Home / Quotes / Quote by Susan Sontag

Quote by Susan Sontag

“Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not.”

Quote by Susan Sontag

Author

Susan Sontag was an American writer, critic, and photographer. Known for her unique literary style and profound thinking, her work spans various fields including literature, art, and politics. Born on January 16, 1933, she passed away on December 28, 2004. more

You May Also Like

“Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera's eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes.”

Looks Eye Beautiful Church Beauty Building Cameras Landscape Factories Avenues Bleak Billboards

Book:On photography

Source: On photography

“Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.”

Giving Has Beens Country States Past Certain United Break United States Giving Up Capitalism Japan Obliged

Book:On photography

Source: On photography

“When comedy fails, seriousness begins to leak back in.”

Comedy Failing Seriousness Leaks

Author:Susan Sontag

“The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, of intellectual vertigo.”

Mind Humans Kind Felt Change Modern Intellectual Historical Sensitive Human Experience Inhuman Nausea Acceleration Vertigo Unreliability Historical Change

Author:Susan Sontag

“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.”

Art Culture Energy Criticism Intellect Revenge Sensual Interpretation Expenses Capability Dilemma

Book:A Susan Sontag reader

Source: A Susan Sontag reader

“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.”

Art Use Theory Art Is Criticism Interpretation Works Of Art Categories Articles Schemes Arrangements Items Dubious

Book:A Susan Sontag reader

Source: A Susan Sontag reader

“The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different; but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas.”

Ideas Different Creative Cutting Periods Rate Boundaries Phases Reconciliation

Author:Susan Sontag

“Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing.”

Life Persons Able Moving Seeing Depends Fluid Dense

Author:Susan Sontag

“Literature usually begets literature.”

Literature Begets

Book:Against Interpretation and Other Essays

Source: Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of "spiritual" feelings and "critical" discontent, is insanity.”

Made Feelings Spiritual Century Disease Madness Critical Superiors Insanity Vehicle Sensitivity Twentieth Century Discontent

Book:Illness as metaphor

Source: Illness as metaphor