Sontag: I Write Because there is Literature

A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.
-Susan Sontag

The first chapter, which is about fourteen typewritten pages, took me four months to write. The last five chapters, some one hundred typewritten pages, took me two weeks.
-Susan Sontag

INTERVIEWER: How much of the book did you have in mind before you started?
I had the title; I can’t write something unless I already know its title. I had the dedication; I knew I would dedicate it to my son. I had the Così fan tutte epigraph. And of course I had the story in some sense, and the span of the book. And what was most helpful, I had a very strong idea of a structure. I took it from a piece of music, Hindemith’s The Four Temperaments—a work I know very well, since it’s the music of one of Balanchine’s most sublime ballets, which I’ve seen countless times. The Hindemith starts with a triple prologue, three very short pieces. Then come four movements—melancholic, sanguinic, phlegmatic, choleric. In that order. I knew I was going to have a triple prologue and then four sections or parts corresponding to the four temperaments—though I saw no reason to belabor the idea by actually labeling Parts I to IV “melancholic,” “sanguinic,” etcetera. I knew all of that, plus the novel’s last sentence: “Damn them all.” Of course, I didn’t know who was going to utter it. In a sense, the whole work of writing the novel consisted of making something that would justify that sentence.
-Susan Sontag

Yes. I hear voices. That’s why I like to write plays.
-Susan Sontag

INTERVIEWER: Do you think much about the audience for your books?
Don’t dare. Don’t want to. But, anyway, I don’t write because there’s an audience. I write because there is literature.
-Susan Sontag