Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag
Susan Sontagwas an American writer, filmmaker, teacher and political activist. She published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964. Her best-known works include On Photography, Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, The Way We Live Now, Illness as Metaphor, Regarding the Pain of Others, The Volcano Lover and In America...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth16 January 1933
CountryUnited States of America
writing thinking people
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.
success mean writing
Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success.
art writing mean
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.
writing would-be truth-is
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.
notebook writing letters
Decline of the letter, the rise of the notebook! One doesn't write to others any more; one writes to oneself.
heart writing stories
The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader's heart.
writing great-writers stills
A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2.
writing interesting might
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 trying stories
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.
dream reading writing
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.
writing mysterious activity
Writing is a mysterious activity.
writing because-i-can i-can
...what I write is smarter than I am. Because I can rewrite it.
writing self bigger
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 thinking stamina
Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.