Literature Quotes by Susan Sontag

Literature usually begets literature.

— Susan Sontag

Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures

— Susan Sontag

Perversity is the muse of modern literature.

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— 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

What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary 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 writer's first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth... and refuse to be an accomplice of lies…

— 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

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

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

— 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

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

— 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

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