Susan Sontag Quotes

The momentum of production keeps you from giving up, so it's really the editing and writing phases where things can look bleakest.

Writing is not hard. Just get paper and pencil, sit down, and write as it occurs to you. The writing is easy-it's the occurring that's hard.

I find it painful when I'm without anything. But I work in multiple fields. If I can't write, I find myself taking photographs. I can go on the road and perform. But the most important thing for me is writing, and when I hit those walls, it's painful.

I know that when I think of myself as being utterly worn out, when I think that somehow I have nothing more to write, then something is happening within me. And, in due course, it bubbles up; it comes to the surface, and then I do my best to listen. But there's nothing mystical about all this. I suppose all writers do the same.

I'd hear a tune in my head and the words would come. And then, very suddenly it just stopped. It seemed too stilted to try and learn how to write a song, to go to round robins and to learn things from other people on how to write a song. So I just stopped and did other things.

If I get ideas independently of the act of writing, they never really fit. So for me, there's no hanging out, waiting for inspiration.

During the course of the year a number of ideas just come up automatically. I could be walking down the street. Or shaving. An idea will hit me and I'll write it down. Then, when I'm ready to write, I check my little matchbooks and napkins and find that it is good or it's pretty terrible. There are other times when I don't have any ideas and I'll go into a room and close the door and I sit and sweat it out for a day or a month and eventually I come up with [something].

Other times I say: I would very much like to try to do something with this music, but after playing for a few minutes, I have to break off.

Once your mind is caught on the right snag, there's nothing so hard about the mechanics of writing.

I remember a point in [writing] the story where I said, "This isn't working, I should go and buy something at the supermarket or my wife will kill me." Then I said, "No, I'll go on."

When you're writing a movie or a play and writing isn't going well, which is for me the normal condition - it's an exceptional day when suddenly I've got something and it's going well - you can call the studio or the producer or whoever is waiting for it and say, "I know I said I was going to have it in by the end of the summer.

What is drawing? How does one get there? It's working one's way through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How can one get through that wall? - since hammering on it doesn't help at all. In my view, one must undermine the wall and grind through it slowly and patiently.

writing is the loneliest job in the world. There's always that frustrating chasm to bridge between the concept and the writing of it. We're a harassed tribe, we writers.

While I was an addict, I didn't write anything. I didn't have the attention span or the will.

How can you write if you can't cry?

I don't take notes; I don't outline, I don't do anything like that. I just flail away at the goddamn thing. I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami. You can't sell it as caviar.

As an English major I was familiar with the stories of dozens of writers trying to get their work done among the multifarious diversions of the world and the hurdles of their own vices. A professor had said that what saved writers is that they, like politicians, had the illusion of destiny that allowed them to overcome obstacles no matter how nominal their work.

I never could figure out how those people like Bukowski could be both carousers and writers at the same time, because to me writing takes as much destructive energy as it takes to be a really good professional drunk.

I just try and do something good. But as a writer, you're slightly out of control.

In modern novels I try to not let myself get away and to be here, and that's why I write about my life and myself. But even when I do that there's an element of disappearing to a place that's not me. It's "the selflessness of writing". It seldom happens, but when it does it's worth quite a lot.

Each story tells me how to write it, but not the one afterwards.

I have spent so long erecting partitions around the part of me that writes - learning how to close the door on it when ordinary lfe intervenes, how to close the door on ordinary life when it's time to start writing again - that I'm not sure I could fit the two parts of me back together now.

If there is any difficulty in what I write, it is because of the material I use. The thought is always simple.

When I hit a period of not being able to write music, I get up and walk away. It's pretty mean but it's true.

I don't really think it comes as a shock to every writer if somebody in their family is mad at them. Yes, it's very upsetting. But it's inherent in the process of trying to make sense of one's life, which is what I think is perhaps at the bottom of writing at all.