850 Quotes by Susan Sontag

I write – and talk – in order to find out what I think.

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.

One doesn’t need to know the artist’s private intentions. The work tells all.

Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art – and in criticism – today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.

Love is friendship on fire – anonymous.

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.

No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.

All my life I’ve been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.

Pornography is one of the branches of literature – science fiction is another – aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation.