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
“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
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
“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
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
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
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
The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both. — 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
Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader's heart. — 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
