Susan Sontag Quotes

People have to find ways of explaining the work.

The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity.

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

Sometimes the truth is more than the sum of the facts.

I believe that sometimes, when we talk about books, we're talking about the big picture - how they're relevant.

It's what people have always done. They have always told stories, put on plays. It's characters and narrative and thought and context and resolution so you reflect the way the world is in some way. It comes out of experience. I think it's OK to do that.

It doesn't seem Shakespeare works if you turn him into a religion.

You really can't quantify what 'Dietland' is.

I guess the role of art is to make something that is ambiguous and complex.

I am interested not in individual readings, but in constructing networks of images and meanings capable of reflecting the complexity of the subject.

A book lives as long as it is unfathomed.

There's truths there that spiral out of what appears to be just a word game. That's what I find mystifying about the meanings of things: they kind of unscrew themselves from the practical words.

Love has various lodgings; the same word does not always signify the same thing.

Movies work, in my opinion, on the best level when they're more enigmatic, when we don't say it's this or that and where it raises more questions than answers.

Who knew three dots could make such a difference? Like everything else, a love or a wish or whatever, it was all in the way you read it.

The sea is an idiom I cannot decipher.

Nature has her language, and she is not unveracious; but we don't know all the intricacies of her syntax just yet, and in a hasty reading we may happen to extract the very opposite of her real meaning.

Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat... where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.

Be careful -- with quotations, you can damn anything.

All art is someone trying to tell you something.

Everyone has to understand what we're saying to one another and there's no point in me thinking the line means this and the person I'm speaking to thinks it means something else. So there's a certain amount of analyzing of text that's of course necessary.

You know, two people can say exactly the same words, saying the same story, and it would mean something entirely different.

But suppose it was truth double strong, it were no truth to me if I couldna take it in. I daresay there's truth in yon Latin book on your shelves; but it's gibberish and no truth to me, unless I know the meaning o' the words.

It is the man determines what is said, not the words.