Life & Wisdom Quote by Susan Sontag

Sontag is picking a fight with the polite idea that thinking is a tidy Q-and-A exchange. The line sounds like a paradox but it’s really a dare: if your “answer” leaves the original question standing, unchanged, you’ve probably done little more than decorate your assumptions. The interesting answer is the one that makes the question obsolete by showing it was badly framed, loaded, sentimental, or strategically narrow. It’s the intellectual version of pulling out the floorboards and discovering the room was built on a false foundation.

The subtext is anti-comfort. Sontag mistrusted the way questions can function as cultural furniture: “What does it mean?” “Is it good or bad?” “Is it political?” These aren’t neutral inquiries so much as habits of control, ways to domesticate art and experience into manageable categories. An answer that “destroys” the question refuses that domestication. It reorients the conversation toward a new vocabulary, new stakes, new modes of attention.

Context matters: Sontag’s career was spent challenging interpretive reflexes, especially the impulse to reduce art to message or symptom. In “Against Interpretation,” she argues for an erotics of art over a hermeneutics, pushing back on criticism that treats artworks like puzzles with a moral prize inside. This quote condenses that ethos into one ruthless sentence. It flatters no one. It suggests that real insight doesn’t close debate; it rewires it, leaving the old questions looking suddenly provincial.