I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“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
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
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
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
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
“[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
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
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
“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
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
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
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
“The Cavaliere has retired to his study and reads, trying not to think about what is going on around him -- one… — 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
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
“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
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
“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
I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Pornography is one of the branches of literature - science fiction is another - aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation. — 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
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
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
Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading. — 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. Who would we be if… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions. 'Nothing is my last word about anything,' said Henry James. Furnishing opinions,… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
I was enthralled and moved by Azar Nafisi's account of how she defied, and helped others to defy, radical Islam's war against… — 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
![“[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/quotes/img-quotes/885/susan-sontag-332_amusement_t-o-read-was-precisely-to-enter-another_438392.jpg)
![“Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject… [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.” quote by Susan Sontag](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/fe1/susan-sontag-332_alienation_anthropology-has-always-struggled-with-a_15322.jpg)
