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
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
A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2. — 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
Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail. — 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
“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
When you are writing, you are - from society's point of view - only producing the first version which will then be… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“There is only so much revealing one can do. For every self-revelation, there has to be a self-concealment. A life-long commitment to… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world." [ Speech upon being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response.… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going… — 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
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
“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
Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptable for one's private, secret thoughts - like a confidante who is deaf, dumb,… — 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
“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
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
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
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
“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
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
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
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
![“A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world." [ Speech upon being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade) , Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]” quote by Susan Sontag](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/2d2/susan-sontag-332_attention_a-writer-i-think-is-someone-who-pays-att_1258443.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)
