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For me, the essays have done their work. I see the world differently, with fresher eyes; my conception of my tasks as a novelist is radically changed. I could describe the process this way. Before I wrote the essays I did not bellieve mandy of the ideas espoused in them; when I wrote them, I believed what I wrote; subsequently, I have come to disbelieve some of these same ideas again–but from a new perspective, one that incorporates and is nourished by what is true in the argument of the essay. Writing criticism has proved to be an act of intellectual disburdenment as much as of intellectual self-expression. — Susan Sontag, A note and some acknowledgements in Against Interpretation (1966), viii