Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past.
Susan SontagRead
I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Writing is done for the love of literature, not for the audience.
In this quote, Susan Sontag emphasizes the intrinsic value of writing and literature, suggesting that the act of writing should stem from a passion for the craft itself rather than seeking external validation or popularity. It highlights the importance of genuine expression and creativity over commercial success or audience approval.
Themes
WritingLiteraturePassionSelf-ExpressionCreativity
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about writing, you could use this quote to emphasize the importance of passion in creativity.
More from Susan Sontag
All quotes →Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
Susan SontagRead
Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!
Susan SontagRead
Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.
Susan SontagRead
In NY sensuality completely turns into sexuality - no objects for the senses to respond to, no beautiful river, houses, people. Awful smells of the street, and dirt... Nothing except eating, if that, and the frenzy of the bed.
Susan SontagRead
It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.
Susan SontagRead
Similar quotes
From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.
Ernest HemingwayRead
There is no art without intention.
Duke EllingtonRead
Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
Pablo PicassoRead
But...books are so much more. Some of them are webs; you can feel your way along their threads, but just barely, into strange and dark corners. Some of them are balloons bobbing up through the sky: totally self-contained, and unreachable, but beautiful to watch. And some of them―the best ones―are doors.
Lauren OliverRead
A work is perfectly finished only when nothing can be added to it and nothing taken away.
Joseph JoubertRead
Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.
Horace WalpoleRead