The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader's heart. — 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
Decline of the letter, the rise of the notebook! One doesn't write to others any more; one writes to oneself. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The writer's first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth... and refuse to be an accomplice of lies… — 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
I'm extremely interested in the Russian formalists and have been for many years. I'm more drawn to their writing, which is expressive… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of… — 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
The writers or artists I write about are not necessarily those I care most about (Shakespeare is still my favourite writer) but… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
A lot of what I've written in criticism of my lust for virtue - my discovery that I've committed idolatry, making of… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The solution to a problem - a story that you are unable to finish - is the problem. It isn't as if… — 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
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
Perhaps it is our perennial fate to be surprised by the simultaneity of events, by the sheer extension of the world in… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“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… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it… — 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
My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive. — 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
