Susan Sontag Literature Quotations

Literature usually begets literature.

The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions. 'Nothing is my last word about anything,' said Henry James. Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions - whenever asked - cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to pursue complexity. Information will never replace illumination.

writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.

If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.

Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.

Pornography is one of the branches of literature - science fiction is another - aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation.

Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures

I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.

Perversity is the muse of modern literature.

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.