By Ila Ananya
“Love words, agonise over sentences. And pay attention to the world,” writer Susan Sontag once famously said.
Sontag was born in New York City on 16th January, 1933, and grew up in Tucson, Arizona. Her books include four novels, a lovely collection of short stories, nine works of non-fiction, and numerous pieces for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Granta, among others — but she has further been known for writing and directing four films and many plays, including Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
On her birthday yesterday, here are a bunch of pieces we came across remembering her — including an interview with The Paris Review, and her reflections on writing, love, and the joy of lists.
1. She kept many lists. Apart from telling us why we need them, she gave us lists of things she liked and disliked.
“Things I like: fires, Venice, tequila, sunsets, babies, silent films, heights, coarse salt, top hats, large long-haired dogs, ship models, cinnamon, goose down quilts”
“Things I dislike: sleeping in an apartment alone, cold weather, couples, football games, swimming, anchovies, mustaches, cats, umbrellas, being photographed”
2. In her interview with The Paris Review, we learn that Sontag writes sitting at a low marble table in her living room. She writes by hand, and her apartment full of books — “at least fifteen thousand”, we are told — and papers lie everywhere.
3. About writing, she tells us, “There is a great deal that either has to be given up or taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.” And almost reassuringly, she also says, “Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.”
4. And here she tells us about beauty versus interestingness.
5. In her advice to writers, she says, “We know we must pick one story, well, one central story; we have to be selective. The art of the writer is to find as much as one can in that story, in that sequence … inthat time (the timeline of the story), in that space (the concrete geography of the story).”