All SUSAN SONTAG Quotes about “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.”
“Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, wonâ€™t come through.”
“I write - and talk - in order to find out what I think.”
“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.”
“To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.”
“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.”
“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.”
“My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.”
“Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.”
“A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“...what I write is smarter than I am. Because I can rewrite it.”
“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.”

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