Books Quotes by Susan Sontag

A good book is an education of the heart.

— Susan Sontag

Most of my reading is rereading.

— Susan Sontag

Perversity is the muse of modern literature.

— Susan Sontag

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

— Susan Sontag

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

You have to sink way down to a level of hopelessness and desperation to find the book that you can write.

— Susan Sontag

I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.

— Susan Sontag

“You have to create your own space which has a lot of silence in it and a lot of books.”

— Susan Sontag

The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader's heart.

— Susan Sontag

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a…

— Susan Sontag

The last sentence of a book is, of course, where you have to stop.

— Susan Sontag

Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures

— Susan Sontag

“The Cavaliere has retired to his study and reads, trying not to think about what is going on around him -- one…

— Susan Sontag

Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North…

— Susan Sontag

A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what…

— Susan Sontag

“A writer is first of all a reader. It is from reading that I derive the standards by which I measure my…

— Susan Sontag

“[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

Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time…

— Susan Sontag

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

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

The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions. 'Nothing is my last word about anything,' said Henry James. Furnishing opinions,…

— Susan Sontag

“Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours. Who would we be if…

— Susan Sontag

One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counterstatements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional,…

— Susan Sontag

Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life…

— Susan Sontag

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

The ratio of authentic literature to trash in pornography may be somewhat lower than the ratio of novels of genuine literary meritto…

— Susan Sontag

“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

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

“This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it…

— Susan Sontag

One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith.

— Susan Sontag

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.

— Susan Sontag

“No book is worth reading once if it is not worth reading many times.”

— Susan Sontag

If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of…

— Susan Sontag

“A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is,…

— Susan Sontag

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

What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life…

— Susan Sontag

Pornography is one of the branches of literature - science fiction is another - aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation.

— Susan Sontag

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

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

“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