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
There is a terrible, mean American resentment toward a writer who tries to do many things. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both. — 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
I write essays first because I have a passionate relationship to the subject and second because the subject is one that people… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
That sort of reception - where everything is assimilated to the world of celebrity - makes me dream of becoming a more… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
When you see your 40-page essay turned into a "hot tip" in one paragraph in Newsweek, you get anxious about the way… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
It's beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The writer must be four people: 1) The nut, the obsede 2) The moron 3) The stylist 4) The critic. 1 supplies… — 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
In a lot of writing or intellectual discourse we're starting to use that model: "Oh, this is where it comes from!" I… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what… — 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
“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
“[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
“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
What I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be… — 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
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)
