Literary Birthday – 16 January – Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag was born on 16 January 1933 and died on 28 December 2004.

Susan Sontag Quotes

1. Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art.
2. A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
3. Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
4. Life is a movie; death is a photograph.
5. A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.
6. What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.
7. If I thought that what I’m doing when I write is expressing myself, I’d junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity than that.
8. My library is an archive of longings.
9. 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.
10. Writing is a mysterious activity.

Read: 7 Pearls Of Writing Wisdom From Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag was an American writer, professor, literary icon, and political activist. After the publication of her 1964 essay, Notes on ‘Camp’,  Sontag became a cultural and intellectual celebrity. Her books include four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America; a collection of short stories, I, etcetera; several plays; and nine works of nonfiction, starting with Against Interpretation and including On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, Where the Stress Falls, Regarding the Pain of Others, and At the Same Time.

Source for Image: Lynn Gilbert, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson
Are you interested in more authors’ birthdays? Please click here: The Complete Author Birthday Calendar