Susan Sontag Quotes

The creative process has been a little bit of an experience, really - to try and make that work for me. The only way I know how to do that is just to remain genuine, humble, and true to everything I know already in my life.

There are so many selves in everybody, and just to explore and exploit one is wrong, dead wrong, for the creative person.

When we are self-conscious, we cannot be wholly aware; we must throw ourselves out first. This throwing ourselves away is the act of creativity.

Each artist comes to the painting or sculpture because there he can be told that he, the individual, transcends all classes and flouts all predictions. In the work of art, he finds his uniqueness confirmed.

Writing is mysterious, and it's supposed to be...any path that gets you there is a good path in the end. But one true thing among all these paths is the need to tap a deep vein of connection between our own uncontrollable interior preoccupations and what we're most concerned about in the world around us. We write in response to that world; we write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves, the live, breathing, bleeding place where the picture forms, and where it all begins.

You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.

I just want to create, and socializing is part of the experience. It might sound crazy, but I don't see myself in the jewelry business. It's an experience.

The individual - man as a man, man as a brain, if you like - interests me more than what he makes because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.

To work on great material, what you really end up working on is yourself, your own humanity.

I think for anyone who follows the 'artistic life,' a certain amount of selfishness and self-involvement is part of the package. You're probably already disregarding a certain material life you could have.

I have done a lot of work internally to find out who I am, what voice Eamonn Walker has and how he wants to put it out there.

My identity started developing through the songs I was writing.

Each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record.

The moving toward one's inner self is a long pilgrimage for a painter. It offers many temporary successes and high points, but impels him on toward the more adequate image.

We are living in a world where the individual must learn to command the raw materials of expression. He must not be dependent all the time on the ready-made, the finished product. It's the transferring, the changing of the raw into what is the expression of your own self – the whole joy and satisfaction and frustration of life is built into this.

An artist is an explorer. He has to begin by self-discovery and by observation of his own procedure. After that he must not feel under any constraint.

It's very easy I think when you're a creative person to wait for the right thing and to start getting self-conscious about how you are going to express what you do and what's special about you. I would say in general, a lot of times the answer is that you just dive into something and you find your own voice through that process.

Inspiration? - a hoax fabricated by poets for their self-importance.

When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void.

Seeing that I am so busily occupied with myself just now, I want to try to paint my self-portrait in writing.

A work of art is something produced by a person, but is not that person — it is of her, but is not her. It’s a reach, really — the artist is trying to inhabit, temporarily, a more compact, distilled, efficient, wittier, more true-seeing, precise version of herself — one that she can’t replicate in so-called ‘real’ life, no matter how hard she tries. That’s why she writes: to try and briefly be more than she truly is.

I'm learning more about life when I'm playing too, and writing music. I'm learning more about life, the connection.

You are the artist and the art.

The creative person is constantly seeking to discover himself, to remodel his own identity, and to find meaning in what he creates.

LSD...reinforc ed my sense of what was important-creat ing great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.