Susan Sontag Quotes

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one-or both. Usually both.

If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.

Writing is a mysterious activity.

My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.

Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.

Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.

One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.

Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it's the secret to good sex.

The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.

That's the source of the meditation on death I've carried in my heart all my life.

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.

My library is an archive of longings.

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.

The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.

Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

Most of my reading is rereading.