Susan Sontag Quotes on Truth
Susan Sontag was a 20th and early 21st-century American writer, critic, and political activist, one of the most prominent public intellectuals of her generation. This page collects quotes attributed to Susan Sontag on the topic of truth, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”
p. 7 -
Attributed to Susan Sontag:
“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.”
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Attributed to Susan Sontag:
“Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.”
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“Ours is an age which consciously pursues health , and yet only believes in the reality of sickness . The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering — rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer's words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.”
Review of Selected Essays by Simone Weil , The New York Review of Books (1 February 1963) -
“The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.”
Review of Selected Essays by Simone Weil , The New York Review of Books (1 February 1963) -
“The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.”
The Benefactor (1963), Ch. 1, p. 1, Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 0-312-42012-9