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Susan Sontag Quotes about Writing

All Susan Sontag Quotes Age Aids Anxiety Art Awareness Beauty Cancer Change Character Comedy Communism Community Consciousness Country Criticism Culture Death Desire Destiny Detachment Dying Energy Evidence Exercise Failing Feelings Funny Giving Health Heart History Identity Illness Imagination Inspiration Inspirational Journey Joy Judgment Language Life Literature Love Lust Lying Memories Metaphor Morality Nature Pain Painting Passion Past Perfection Photography Pleasure Pollution Purpose Quality Reading Reality Revenge Risk Sexuality Silence Style Suffering Surrealism Today Tradition Tragedy Transformation Travel Understanding Values Violence Waiting War Writing quotes

We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most

We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.

Art, Writing, Destiny

Decline of the letter, the rise of the notebook! One doesn't write to others any more; one writes to oneself.

Notebook, Writing, Letters

Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.511, Macmillan

I write - and talk - in order to find out what I think.

Writing, Thinking, Order

Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.169, Macmillan

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

Inspiration, Writing, Guilt

I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.

Writing, Literature, Audience

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

Writing, Ideas, Comeback

Susan Sontag (2013). “Against Interpretation and Other Essays”, p.323, Penguin UK

Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail.

Writing, Giving, Way

Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.

Writing, Thinking, Stamina

Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.555, Macmillan

Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.

Writing, Doors, Pieces

Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.45, Macmillan

Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.

Writing, Talking, Touching

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.

Writing, Would Be, Truth Is

Christine Allison, Susan Sontag (1978). “The benefactor: a novel”, Delta

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.

Dream, Reading, Writing

There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.

Taken, Writing, Body

Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.547, Macmillan

I write in spurts. I write when I have to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something has matured in my head and I can write it down. But once something is really under way, I don't want to do anything else. I don't go out, much of the time I forget to eat, I sleep very little. It's a very undisciplined way of working and makes me not very prolific. But I'm too interested in many other things.

Writing, Sleep, Want

To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.

Writing, Tasks, Slavery

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Art, Writing, Feelings

I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive.

Writing, Elements, Alive

I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response. But when I write, I'm very uncertain whether it's good enough. That is, of course, the writer's agony.

Writing, Agony, Passionate

...what I write is smarter than I am. Because I can rewrite it.

Writing, Because I Can, Smarter

We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they can also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we'd rather dwell or where we think we are already living. They can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down.

Art, Writing, Mean

I write essays first because I have a passionate relationship to the subject and second because the subject is one that people are not talking about.

Writing, Talking, People

Source: ctheory.net

Most writers I know have switched to word processors. I haven't but I'm very curious about why people like it so much. I think it has something to do with the fact that at last writing, which has been such an old-fashioned, artisanal activity, even on a typewriter, has now entered the central domain of modern experience which is that of making copies, being involved in the world of duplicates and machine-mediated activities.

Writing, Thinking, Typewriters

Source: ctheory.net

Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.

Writing, Interesting, Might

The solution to a problem - a story that you are unable to finish - is the problem. It isn't as if the problem is one thing and the solution something else. The problem, properly understood = the solution. Instead of trying to hide or efface what limits the story, capitalize on that very limitation. State it, rail against it.

Writing, Trying, Stories

Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.409, Macmillan

You have to sink way down to a level of hopelessness and desperation to find the book that you can write.

Book, Writing, Levels

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