Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours. Who would we be if we could not sympathize with those who … - Susan Sontag

The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force - not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self - these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live. Mostly it is a matter of tone: it is hardly possible to give credence to ideas uttered in the impersonal tones of sanity.

To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.