Susan Sontag Quotes

I don't really look at myself as the kind of person who craves attention, but I've never been to therapy so there's probably a lot of stuff about myself that I don't know.

Maybe I spent more time dwelling on emotions than some people, and maybe that's why I ended up writing.

The music I make and the process of acting, for me, are both about trying to understand people and get inside what makes us tick. That's the main thing that excites me. Our sense of who we really are and what drives us.

I've really taken time to dive into my heart and my emotions a little more. I think, before, I was a little nervous to open up that box and go, 'What's in there,' you know? Now, that's what's made the best music, and that's what I've been able to pull out of parts of myself that I never knew existed.

When you start to think of the arts as not this thing that is going to get you somewhere in terms of becoming an artist or becoming famous or whatever it is that people do, but rather a way of making being in the world not just bearable, but fascinating, then it starts to get interesting again.

I think the better you know yourself as a person, the better an actor you can be.

I still hope that more people can create art, even though artistic genres may never be the most popular or money-making genres. But the thing is, I think art is more long-lasting. It stays in people, and it changes them.

It is curious how an age of public self-revelation, and of the use of psychological jargon, should also be an age when self-examination is rarely practised.

If life is a blank canvas and all people are artists, the big challenge we all face may be expressed this way: Will we ultimately produce something approaching a masterpiece, an acceptable but not particularly memorable work of art, or a creation that wouldn't even be purchased at a yard sale?

It is art, and art only, that reveals us to ourselves.

The more that we self-analyze ourselves, the nicer we are to people and to ourselves, and the more we understand each other.

How easy it is to be "deep": all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.

I think over time you learn to know a bit more about yourself - you develop a certain amount of self-insight and self-awareness, and you know what you can absorb, and what you cannot; what gets to you and what doesn't.

The person who understands the evil in his own heart is the only person who is useful, fruitful, and solid in his beliefs and obedience. Others only delude themselves and thus upset families, churches, and all other relationships. In their self-pride and judgment of others, they show great inconsistency.

Like, in retrospect, this whole Mini-Album is about itself, and the process of letting go of the fear of what people will think about the music or of me or whatever and just putting it out there. But none of that was intentional at all.

When I go back and reread the stuff, I'm always floored by how deeply personal and revealing it actually is.

Self-knowledge leads to wonder, and wonder to curiosity and investigation, so that nothing interests people more than people, even if only one's own person.

You have to learn to recognize your own depth.

You have to start knowing yourself so well that you begin to know other people. A piece of us is in every person we can ever meet.

Sometimes people's reactions tell more about themselves.

Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.

I always take a close look at those who lose themselves in self portraits. They are solitary souls, prone to introspection, who have really grappled with their existence.

We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art...what we are talking about and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered. I think I don't regret a single "excess" of my responsive youth I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.

For most people, self-awareness and self-pity blossom simultaneously in early adolescence. It's about that time that we start viewing the world as something other than a whoop-de-doo playground, we start to experience personally how threatening it can be, how cruel and unjust. At the very moment when we become, for the first time, both introspective and socially conscientious, we receive the bad news that the world, by and large, doesn't give a rat's ass.

I have no perspective as regards my work. One reason I put out records and books is people respond to it, and it enables you to actually see the work more clearly. It's a form of therapy for me. Sometimes abusive therapy.