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"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."
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"The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth."
"Stories are like children. They grow in their own way."
"In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself."
"It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then."
"It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel."
"The literary man re-reads, other men simply read."
"And she never could remember and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book."
"One of the most dangerous of literary ventures is the little, shy, unimportant heroine whom none of the other characters value. The danger is that your readers may agree with the other characters."
"Like someone excitedly relating a story, only to find the words petering out, the path gets narrower the further I go, the undergrowth taking over."
"I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else."
Explore more quotes by Susan Sontag
"Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt."
"Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone."
"It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin."
"Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims."
"Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one."
"I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future."
"As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure."
"This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself - albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job."
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