Susan Sontag Quotes

Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse. . . Remember that in order to recover as an artist, you must be willing to be a bad artist. Give yourself permission to be a beginner. By being willing to be a bad artist, you have a chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one

TV never takes any chances; they never do anything different.

I always wrote, you know, but it was just this thing I did; what I intended was to become a terribly famous artist, perhaps with a stopover as a singer.

I'm kind of surprised that so many of those other books were almost exactly like mine. They even follow the form. There were some books that even copied the stamp. It shows so little imagination.

An artist's career always begins tomorrow.

There are writers who do start doing the same thing again and again and almost inevitably fall into self-parody.

I was an absolutely untalented designer.

The danger that keeps me just a little frightened with every book I write, however, is that I'll overreach myself once too often and try to write a story that I'm just plain not talented or skilful enough to write. That's the dilemma every storyteller faces. It is painful to fail. But it is far sadder when a storyteller stops wanting to try.

You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to live and study... Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I'll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.

If we are not willing to fail we will never accomplish anything. All creative acts involve the risk of failure.

I'm no innovator. If anything I'm a stealer, or borrower. I've stolen or borrowed from more people than you can shake a stick at.

You take the risk of being rejected. If you have pretentions to be an artist of any kind, you have to take the risk of people rejecting you and thinking you're an arsehole.

Commonplace people have an answer for everything and nothing ever surprises them. They try to look as though they knew what you were about to say better than you did yourself, and when it is their turn to speak, they repeat with great assurance something that they have heard other people say, as though it were their own invention.

He was, as Billy Name said in the acclaimed Ric Burns documentary about Andy Warhol, uninterested in being a second-tier artist. He was uninterested in being a first-tier artist! He wanted to be, you know, a god. Someone who completely changed the...he wanted to be Zeus with the lightning bolt and nothing less would have satisfied him.

Banality is sometimes striking.

You can't expect everyone to laugh or applaud you for doing edgy things. Sometimes you'll miss. But I think comedians are artists and there's a value in failure. It kind of works both ways between comedians and audiences. The audience has to understand that comedians are going to sometimes tell a joke that doesn't work out with dark subjects, and the comedian has to understand that sometimes they 'll fail and it's not the audience's fault for not getting it or loving it.

It's not evil that's ruining the earth, but mediocrity. The crime is not that Nero played while Rome burned, but that he played badly.

No one is original. Everyone is derivative.

Risk is what separates the artist from the artisan.

[On U.S. universities:] The bland leading the bland.

It is so much worse to be a mediocre artist than to be a mediocre post-office clerk.

Certain dressmakers desire to pass for an artist. I have one ambition: that is to have good taste.

If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?

Lots of ambitious work by young artists ends up in a dumpster after its warehouse debut. So an unknown artist's big glass vitrine holding a rotting cow's head covered by maggots and swarms of buzzing flies may be pretty unsellable. Until the artist becomes a star. Then he can sell anything he touches .