Susan Sontag Quotes

There were times where I felt I was pressing a little bit too hard with the humor, and I had to pull back, because the overriding concern of the book was to create this disease that had no cure and make you pay attention to every emotional stage of what happens.

Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.

You [as an actor] have a responsibility to Jonathan's book and you have a responsibility to talk about a subject that is going to be, whether it's contentious or not, it's going t bring up a huge, emotional response from people. A lot of people will say they are ready or they're not ready.

I have always wanted to do a book about actors because I think that the death of a character is a tremendously emotional experience.

I write the big scenes first, that is, the scenes that carry the meaning of the book, the emotional experience.

I think the book is less emotional than the film. With the film, the emotions are much more raw and in front. In the book, they are kind of ironized and seen through comedy.

I want to engage the reader. I'm an emotional writer, in the sense that I would be happy if you re-read a book for the intellectual or the mental part of it, but, the first time, I just like to reach out and grab you, pull you in.

Without explaining why, and, most of all, without naming other authors or books, I can only say my novels are influenced by love and death.

Ever since I was a little child, I refused to see movies of books that I loved. Because you already know what Heidi looks like and she doesn't look like Shirley Temple.

Books are personal, passionate. They stir emotions and spark thoughts in a manner all their own, and I'm convinced that the shattered world has less hope for repair if reading becomes an ever smaller part of it.

You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.

I don't really remember much before was eight, but I do remember that my dad brought me to drop me off at my grandmother's house, and he was a very emotional guy, but that was the first time I really saw him cry, cos I knew it killed him to have to give me up, but he knew I needed some family structure. That was the last time I'd see him or talk to him when he was sober for the next 10 years.

I like to think of music as an emotional science.

There were epochs in the history of humanity in which the writer was a sacred person. He wrote the sacred books, universal books, the codes, the epic, the oracles. Sentences inscribed on the walls of the crypts; examples in the portals of the temples. But in those times the writer was not an individual alone; he was the people.

Alfred Hitchcock, Isaac Newton, Elvis Presley, Captain Bligh, they're heroic or pathetic depending on which book you buy.

Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional.

What you aren't ready for being the first time in space - on an emotional and intellectual level - is how looking down at Earth will profoundly affect you. Over the long term, it has changed the way I think about planet Earth. When you go around the planet and look down, you think about the fact that this is the cradle of humanity, that this is a place where seven billion people, 200 countries, live side by side, that we share this place and there's nowhere else to go.

I always sent my mother all these huge books I made. When my mother died, I was cleaning her cupboard, and these big books were only 20 pages long. She edited out, maybe burned, every single photograph where I'm naked.

There are moments when a kind of clarity comes over you, and suddenly you can see through walls to another dimension that you'd forgotten or chosen to ignore in order to continue living with the various illusions that make life, particularily life with other people, possible.

In the art world, creativity involves aesthetic sensibility, emotional resonance and a gift for expression.

I have a limitless amount of great music at my disposal and it's very, very pleasurable because when the music goes on the film it's amazing how much it livens up the film and gives it an emotional kick in the pants, sort of.

The paper landed on the table, but the news was stapled to his chest. A tattoo.

There was one sequence of days [making Lincoln in the Bardo] when I had halfway decided to use the historical nuggets, but I wasn't quite sure it would work. I'd be in my room for six or seven hours, cutting up bits of paper with quotes and arranging them on the floor, with this little voice in my head saying, "Hey, this isn't writing!" But at the end of that day, I felt that the resulting section was doing important emotional work

Books about suicide make lousy gifts.

Having emotional connections to things that don't really exist, like looking at a green ball and really loving that green ball, and being sad whether it's around or not. Stuff like that. I've never done acting at this level before so it was a huge challenge for me. It was a hurdle to overcome just to survive.