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"I'm now writing out of rage — and I feel a kind of Nietzschean elation. It's tonic. I roar with laughter. I want to denounce everybody, tell everybody off. I go to my typewriter as I might go to my machine gun. But I'm safe. I don't have to face the consequences of 'real' aggressivity. I'm sending out colis piégés ['booby-trapped packages'] to the world."
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"You would be amazed by how I can torture the English language. I am an abusive lover."

"Imagination is phenomenal."

"The future is created by those who have a great imagination and the will to make it a reality by their actions."

"Develop your own skills and styles. In music, designing, electronics, etc., you may have a peculiar way of exposing your dreams in an uncommon way."

"A creative mind is a spark of divinity."

"Flawed genius is better than flawless talent."

"People have many cruel expectations from writers. People expect novelists to live on a hill with three kids and a spouse, people expect children's story writers to never have sex, and people expect all great poets to be dead. And these are all very difficult expectations to fulfill, I think."

"I write to fill my mind with the ecstasy of life."

"If imagination is your wealth, then ideas are your abode."
Explore more quotes by Susan Sontag


"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."


"Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois."


"The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means."


"What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine."


"The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility."


"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."


"A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning."
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