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"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."
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Exlpore more Creativity quotes
"Imagination is the creative force that through necessity yields solutions to resolve the issues that face us."
"No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist."
"But the detail of the poem shows power akin to genius, and reveals to us that much neglected law of literary history -- that potential genius can never become actual unless it finds or makes the Form which it requires."
"The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal that you can gather votes like box tops is, I think, the ultimate indignity to the democratic process."
"And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right."
"We are all artists, painting the world with our thoughts while coloring the universe with our deeds."
"If you ever desire to give birth to anything at all, then you cannot do without solitude."
"Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it."
"Like most arts, the link between the mind and the pen can chain you like an enslaved workaholic. Even on an intended vacation you suddenly have this killer urge to record whatever the vacation may teach."
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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