"Sanity is a cozy lie."
"In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable."
54 likes
Source: Evergreen Review Dec. 1964
About the author
Same author
More quotes by Susan Sontag
"A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it."
"The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste."
"A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning."
"What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine."
"We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters."