Susan Sontag Quotes

In my mind, there's not a great difference between what people call fiction and non-fiction. So in that sense, I'm like an early-18th-century person. I actually believe there's one way of writing.

I loved writing a book in which, in some ways, it's very, very classical, and in some ways I'm breaking lots of rules about what you can do and what you can't do.

There's always a bit of fiction in everything that I write.

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it's imaginary. You don't have to pretend it's not a book. We don't have to pretend that people don't write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn't the only way to do it. Once you're writing in the first person, then the narrator is a writer.

When you do fiction, it is your imagination you have put out there.

Like all novelists, I'm interested in the filters between reality and the imagination.

The art of writing fiction is to sail as dangerously close to the truth as possible without sinking the ship

There are writers who draw immediate attention to the fact that it's fiction. And I like some of that, but it doesn't really have the power.

I am far less interested in serving as a change agent than in functioning as a prose artist, whether it's fiction or nonfiction.

You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.

This is form and content and diction and tone and imagination all looking up at the exact same moment: When Molly Tanzer claps once at the front of the classroom.

If you get bored with nothing to do, you are not a writer ... We are in the business of reproducing reality from nothing. We are the biggest liars in the world, seeking truth.

Sometimes journalists ask me, "What's the message?" There is no message. I think that fiction should not be trying to give messages. Just tell a story.

Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.

The fact, and the intuition or logic about the fact, are severe coordinates in fiction. In the short story they must cross with hair-line precision.

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

I, as the writer, can be very clear that I am writing a work of heightened fiction, as opposed to documenting horrible things that happen every day in the world. Which I have no interest in doing.

Poets themselves, tho' liars by profession, always endeavour to give an air of truth to their fictions.

You write fiction, you're writing memoir, and when you're writing memoir, you're writing fiction.

The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said. Looking for metaphors, for example: When I was a young man I was always hunting for new metaphors. Then I found out that really good metaphors are always the same.

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.

For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.

Writers are liars my dear, surely you know that by now?

When you write, you want to get rid of the world, don’t you? Of course you do. When you’re writing, you’re creating your own worlds.