Quote

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.

Susan Sontag

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Susan Sontag
Age: 71 †
Born: 1933
Born: January 16
Died: 2004
Died: December 28
Author
Essayist
Feminist
Film Critic
Film Director
Historian
Human Rights Activist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
New York City
New York
Susan Rosenblatt
Good
Direct
Love
Writer
Like
Courses
Course
Profoundly
Whether
Agony
Write
Uncertain
Enough
Passionate
Writing
Response

More quotes by Susan Sontag

Image
All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable.
Susan Sontag
Image
What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.
Susan Sontag
Image
War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.
Susan Sontag
Image
I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don't consider it a moral virtue.
Susan Sontag
Image
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.
Susan Sontag
Image
A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.
Susan Sontag
Image
What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.
Susan Sontag
Image
I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.
Susan Sontag
Image
Now the new things happening in France don't interest me.
Susan Sontag
Image
By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.
Susan Sontag
Image
Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.
Susan Sontag
Image
Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.
Susan Sontag
Image
The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
Susan Sontag
Image
The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.
Susan Sontag
Image
Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.
Susan Sontag
Image
Wherever people feel safe — they will be indifferent.
Susan Sontag
Image
The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.
Susan Sontag
Image
Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead.
Susan Sontag
Image
Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans - the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.
Susan Sontag
Image
His view of time, and of change, has become that of most elderly people: he hates change, since for him - for his body - any change is for the worse. And if there is to be change, then he wants it to happen quickly, so it does not use up too much of the time remaining to him.
Susan Sontag