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Susan Sontag Quotes about Writing - Page 2

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

Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success.

Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success.

Success, Writing, Mean

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 their time. I'd be very afraid to write from a position where I consciously thought I was smarter than most of my readers.

Writing, Thinking, People

"The risk taker". Interview with Gary Younge, www.theguardian.com. January 19, 2002.

It's beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake.

Writing, Lakes, Decision

The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader's heart.

Writing, Heart, Stories

Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.407, Macmillan

A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2.

Writing, Great Writers, Stills

Susan Sontag (2008). “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963”, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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, Typewriters, Junk

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.

Writing, Self, Transcendence

Writing is a mysterious activity.

Writing, Mysterious, Activity

I didn't think of myself as importing, I thought it was more interesting to write about things people didn't know about than what they did. When I became aware that I was in fact "importing", I stopped doing it.

Writing, Thinking, People

Source: ctheory.net

In a lot of writing or intellectual discourse we're starting to use that model: "Oh, this is where it comes from!" I would like to concentrate on work which is more resistant to that procedure, as I think fiction is.

Writing, Thinking, Intellectual

Source: ctheory.net

When you are writing, you are - from society's point of view - only producing the first version which will then be processed and recycled.

Writing, Views, Firsts

Source: ctheory.net

The writers or artists I write about are not necessarily those I care most about (Shakespeare is still my favourite writer) but those whose work I feel has been neglected.

Writing, Artist, Care

Source: ctheory.net

When you see your 40-page essay turned into a "hot tip" in one paragraph in Newsweek, you get anxious about the way your writing has been used.

Writing, Hot, Pages

Source: ctheory.net

I'm extremely interested in the Russian formalists and have been for many years. I'm more drawn to their writing, which is expressive and literary, than to writing which is extremely academic or jargon-ridden.

Writing, Years, Jargon

Source: ctheory.net

I'm more cautious about what I write.

Writing, Cautious

Source: ctheory.net

Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.

Writing, Gone, Use

Source: ctheory.net

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