Susan Sontag Quotes

I have grown in my writing and I care about it now and I know how important it is to write stuff.

In my early twenties, that's when I really began to write. Before that, I was too busy working, keeping myself going.

No, I have to really focus, especially when I'm writing because I wanna be good at it.

All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

Writing is above all a question of instinct.

I write dozens and dozens of pages more than I need, and then edit them down to size. It's more like sculpture than construction.

Translating is writing.

One of our big goals in search is to make search that really understands exactly what you want, understands everything in the world. As computer scientists, we call that artificial intelligence.

Writing is a subtle art that is reached mostly by self-discovery and experimentation.

I only want to write. And there's no college for that except life.

I can't understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again.

Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work, throw it away. It's a nice feeling, and you don't want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.

No writing is a waste of time – no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good.

Writing is a weird thing because we can read, we know how to write a sentence. It's not like a trumpet where you have to get some skill before you can even produce a sound. It's misleading because it's hard to make stories. It seems like it should be easy to do but it's not. The more you write, the better you're going to get. Write and write and write. Try not to be hard on yourself.

The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising.

The goal is to be both disciplined and loose, so that the writing does not turn into a task or a chore. To leave myself behind, along with the mechanics, and disappear into the lives of my characters.

Though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.

I hardly know what I'm going to write - an article, a story, a poem in free verse - or in some regular form. I only know that when I have the first sentence. And when the first sentence makes a kind of pattern, then I find out the kind of rhythm I'm looking for.

I don't think screenplay writing is the same as writing - I mean, I think it's blueprinting.

It's never perfect when I write it down the first time, or the second time, or the fifth time. But it always gets better as I go over it and over it.

When I start writing, the first line might come from reality, but the second and the third one, I have to write it. So this is the genesis of my creation. If I want to know what happens, if I want to find out the secret, I have to write it.

Usually when I'm writing, I kind of know what it is before I start writing and I write stream of consciousness style.

Of all the disciplines involved in making anything - TV, film or anything I do - the writing is the most valuable commodity.

In a sense, the story, or poem or verse or whatever it is you're writing, you can kind of think of it as a kind of projectile. Imagine it is a kind of projectile which has been specially shaped to be aerodynamic, and that your target is the soft grey putty of the reader's brain.