“You have to create your own space which has a lot of silence in it and a lot of books.” — 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
“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
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
“[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
“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
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
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
“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
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
Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The ratio of authentic literature to trash in pornography may be somewhat lower than the ratio of novels of genuine literary meritto… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“No book is worth reading once if it is not worth reading many times.” — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith. — 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
Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours. — 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
I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature. — 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
the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
