The greatest effort is to be really where you are, contemporary with yourself, in your life, giving full attention to the world. That's what a writer does. I'm against the solipsistic idea that you find it all in your head. You don't.

The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of "what is already known." Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interestig ideas, after all, are heresies.

I find it impossible to keep moral feelings out of my desire for pleasure. That is, part of my experience of pleasure is that there are facile pleasures, as there are facile ideas.

--Susan Sontag