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
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
Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“No book is worth reading once if it is not worth reading many times.” — 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
“[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
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
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
“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
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
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
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
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
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
“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
“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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life. — Susan Sontag Copy Share
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
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
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
“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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. — Susan Sontag Copy Share
The feminist movement has been important to me because it's made me feel less odd and also because it has made me understand some… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
![“[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/i/885/susan-sontag-332_amusement_t-o-read-was-precisely-to-enter-another_438392.jpg)
![“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/i/2d2/susan-sontag-332_attention_a-writer-i-think-is-someone-who-pays-att_1258443.jpg)
