Jonathan Cott

What makes me feel strong?” Sontag asked herself in one of her journal entries, giving as her answer: “Being in love and work,”

Sontag might have felt that Anne Carson was in fact speaking for both of them when she confessed that “falling in love and coming to know make me feel genuinely alive.”

Everything that happens to me is something I think about

The easiest thing in the world is to think about what’s happening to you

I don’t fully understand this process. But I didn’t feel distant at all

Writing is not usually enjoyable for me

don’t know if my book on photography is useful to anybody except in the most general sense that it adds to people’s consciousness and makes things more complicated, which I think is always good

No, because it was two weeks after I was told I had cancer that I cleaned out those ideas. The first thing I thought was: What did I do to deserve this? I’ve led the wrong life, I’ve been too repressed. Yes, I suffered a great grief five years ago and this must be the result of that intense depression.

Well, I chose to fall in love with this person who turned out to be a bastard

It was my choice, and I don’t like blaming other people because it’s so much easier to change oneself than to change other people