I LOVE Paris Review INTERVIEWS more than Food + Air

“It was not a question of knowledge . . . but of alertness, a fastidious transcription of what could be thought about something, once it swam into the stream of attention.”
-Susan Sontag

A writer is someone who pays attention to the world.
-Susan Sontag

I read the biography of Madame Curie by her daughter, Eve Curie, when I was about six, so at first I thought I was going to be a chemist. Then for a long time, most of my childhood, I wanted to be a physician. But literature swamped me. What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.
-Susan Sontag

I saw myself as (I guess I was) a heroic autodidact. I looked forward to the struggle of the writing life. I thought of being a writer as a heroic vocation. [...]
Later, when I was thirteen, I read the journals of André Gide, which described a life of great privilege and relentless avidity.
-Susan Sontag

I remember reading real books—biographies, travel books—when I was about six. And then free fall into Poe and Shakespeare and Dickens and the Brontës and Victor Hugo and Schopenhauer and Pater, and so on. I got through my childhood in a delirium of literary exaltations.
-Susan Sontag

I felt as if I were from another planet—
-Susan Sontag

I do remember—I was about four—a scene in a park, hearing my Irish nanny saying to another giant in a starched white uniform, Susan is very high-strung, and thinking, That’s an interesting word. Is it true?
-Susan Sontag


INTERVIEWER: Tell me something about your education.
All in public schools, quite a number of them, each one more lowering than the one before. But I was lucky to have started school before the era of the child psychologists. Since I could read and write, I was immediately put into the third grade, and later I was skipped another semester, so I was graduated from high school—North Hollywood High School—when I was still fifteen.
-Susan Sontag

He was the first person I met who had written books that I owned. (I except an audience I was roped into with Thomas Mann when I was fourteen years old, which I recounted in a story called “Pilgrimage.”) Writers were as remote to me as movie stars.
-Susan Sontag

INTERVIEWER: But you taught only through your twenties, and have refused countless invitations to return to university teaching. Is this because you came to feel that being an academic and being a creative writer are incompatible?
Yes. Worse than incompatible. I’ve seen academic life destroy the best writers of my generation.
-Susan Sontag

INTERVIEWER: Do you mind being called an intellectual?
Well, one never likes to be called anything. And the word makes more sense to me as an adjective than as a noun, though, even so, I suppose there will always be a presumption of graceless oddity—especially if one is a woman. Which makes me even more committed to my polemics against the ruling anti-intellectual clichés—heart versus head, feeling versus intellect, and so forth.
-Susan Sontag

With my writer’s consciousness, I rejoice in any writer I can admire, women writers no more or less than men.
-Susan Sontag

Writing is an activity that in my experience doesn’t get easier with practice. On the contrary.
-Susan Sontag

It starts with sentences, with phrases, and then I know something is being transmitted. Often it’s an opening line. But sometimes I hear the closing line, instead.
-Susan Sontag

INTERVIEWER: Is there anything that helps you get started writing?
Reading—which is rarely related to what I’m writing, or hoping to write. I read a lot of art history, architectural history, musicology, academic books on many subjects. And poetry. Getting started is partly stalling, stalling by way of reading and of listening to music, which energizes me and also makes me restless. Feeling guilty about not writing.
-Susan Sontag

INTERVIEWER: Do you write every day?
No. I write in spurts. I write when I have to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something has matured in my head and I can write it down. But once something is really under way, I don’t want to do anything else. I don’t go out, much of the time I forget to eat, I sleep very little. It’s a very undisciplined way of working and makes me not very prolific. But I’m too interested in many other things.
-Susan Sontag

INTERVIEWER: Yeats said famously that one must choose between the life and the work. Do you think that is true?
As you know, he actually said that one must choose between perfection of the life and perfection of the work. Well, writing is a life—a very peculiar one. Of course, if by life you mean life with other people, Yeats’s dictum is true. Writing requires huge amounts of solitude. What I’ve done to soften the harshness of that choice is that I don’t write all the time. I like to go out—which includes traveling; I can’t write when I travel. I like to talk. I like to listen. I like to look and to watch. Maybe I have an Attention Surplus Disorder. The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.
-Susan Sontag

I revise as I go along. And that’s quite a pleasurable task. I don’t get impatient and I’m willing to go over and over something until it works. It’s beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake. Only when I’m about a third of the way can I tell if it’s good enough. Then I have my cards, and I can play my hand.
-Susan Sontag

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