Susan Sontag Quotes

Once the grammar has been learned, writing is simply talking on paper and in time learning what not to say.

The way you write affects what you say.

For me, speaking to anyone - on a stage, in an elevator - I am looking for impact and connection. The same goes for writing.

Those who write as they speak, even though they speak well, write badly.

Action can give us the feeling of being useful, but only words can give us a sense of weight and purpose.

It's akin to style, what I'm talking about, but it isn't style alone. It is the writer's particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There's plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.

Good writers are in the business of leaving signposts saying, Tour my world, see and feel it through my eyes; I am your guide.

What I've been saying to people is that I write it.

I think that I speak a lot like I write.

Manner is all in all, whate'er is writ,The substitute for genius, sense, and wit.

The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn't be any of this.

Thy words, I grant are bigger, for I wear not, my dagger in my mouth.

What concerns me is that man, unable to articulate, to express himself adequately, reverts to action. Since the vocabulary of action is limited, as it were, to his body, he is bound to act violently, extending his vocabulary with a weapon where there should have been an adjective.

My style of writing is very diffrent from yours.

Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.

We speak naturally but spend all our lives trying to write naturally.

A man who writes well writes not as others write, but as he himself writes; it is often in speaking badly that he speaks well.

I like to talk. Talking is kind of my thing. If talking had been a sport option at Wexford, I would have been captain. But sports always have to involve running, jumping, or swinging your arms around. You don’t get PE points for the smooth and rapid movement of the jaw.

All the fun is in how you say a thing.

I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated.

Physical love is unthinkable without violence.

It is through the tongue, the pen, and the press that truth is principally propagated.

Writing is always harder than talking.

Success means being heard and don't stand there and tell me that you are indifferent to being heard. You may write for the joy of it, but the act of writing is not complete in itself. It has to end in its audience.