The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
You have to sink way down to a level of hopelessness and desperation to find the book that you can write. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
There is a terrible, mean American resentment toward a writer who tries to do many things. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“No book is worth reading once if it is not worth reading many times.” — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“[T]o read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader's own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
I guess I think I'm writing for people who are smarter than I am, because then I'll be doing something that's worth… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is,… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
What I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“A writer is first of all a reader. It is from reading that I derive the standards by which I measure my… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
I write in spurts. I write when I have to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counterstatements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional,… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours. Who would we be if… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Most writers I know have switched to word processors. I haven't but I'm very curious about why people like it so much.… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptable for one's private, secret thoughts - like a confidante who is deaf, dumb,… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“Well, it does educate us about life. I wouldn’t be the person I am, I wouldn’t understand what I understand, were it… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“Two kinds of writers. Those who think this life is all there is, and want to describe everything: the fall, the battle,… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life. — Susan Sontag Copy Share
Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject… [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
“Why not eliminate schooling between age 12-16? It’s biologically + psychologically too turbulent a time to be cooped up inside, made to sit all… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb.… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different; but… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. — Susan Sontag Copy Share
The feminist movement has been important to me because it's made me feel less odd and also because it has made me understand some… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
![“[T]o read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader's own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement -- not incitement.” quote by Susan Sontag](https://sms4smile.com/q/img-quotes/885/susan-sontag-332_amusement_t-o-read-was-precisely-to-enter-another_438392.jpg)
