Susan Sontag Writing Quotations

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.

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.

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.

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

Writing is a mysterious activity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.