Susan Sontag Quotes

I used to love writing in my journal.

I always had music growing up, but music was also like a journal. It was like my personal diary or personal journal. A lot of the things I couldn't express to an individual, I would express them in my music.

I wasn't quite used to writing a diary - I didn't understand why people did it - but I wrote down notes and they went into a poem.

Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptable for one's private, secret thoughts - like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself. ... The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather - in many cases - offers an alternative to it.

Today I start a diary; it is against my usual habbits, but out of a clearly felt need.

People think my work is therapeutic. I don't see it that way. It's not like I'm saving money from a weekly therapy visit by writing down my life.

My songs are just little letters to me.

I am always writing to myself.

My diary seems to keep me whole.

He wrote one more paragraph for his own sake, to see what he had to say.

Writing in a journal reminds you of your goals and of your learning in life. It offers a place where you can hold a deliberate, thoughtful conversation with yourself.

I have been blessed with roles that allow me to express something very personal at a specific time in my life. I seek them out; acting is my therapy.

If you really want to know yourself, start by writing a book.

I had a lot of songs and words and scenes stuck inside of me. So Jacknife encouraged me to bring them all out. So, in essence, 'You and Others' is my diary.

I've always used poetry to explain myself to myself. These things just sat in my psyche and then came out.

When I go back and read my journals or fiction, I am always surprised. I may not remember having those thoughts, but they still exist and I know they are mine, and it's all part of making sense of who I am.

Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself.

I write in a journal occasionally. But it is not a daily discipline for me.

Which implies that the real issue in art is the audience's response. Now I claim that when I make things, I don't care about the audience's response, I'm making them for myself. But I'm making them for myself as audience, because I want to wake myself up.

I am still the place where creation does some work on itself.

I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.

Go on thinking that you don't need to be read and you'll find that it may become quite true: no one will feel the need tom read it because it is written for yourself alone; and the public won't feel any impulse to gate crash such a private party.

I have kept journals at different times in my life. And a lot of my early notebooks became places where I would just think on the page, trying to parse what I was feeling, to find out what I was thinking.

When I write for myself, I think about myself and draw from my own experience.

Music is my form of cleansing and introspection, so I have to grow in order to accomplish it.