Quotes About Sontag

Susan, Susan -- Poetry: aviation! Prose: infantry. [to Susan Sontag]

The problem is that Sontag wasn't sufficiently interested in real-life details, the lifeblood of fiction, but only in ideas. She also wrote and directed films, which were not well reviewed: I have not seen these myself, but there is time enough to do so, for I have long assumed that they are playing as a permanent double feature in the only movie theater in hell.

During the Vietnam War, Sontag went off to Hanoi as one of those people Lenin called "useful idiots"—that is, people who could be expected to defend Communism without any interest in investigating the brutality behind it.

systematically murderous totalitarian system of all, conspired in their own death, was yet a fourth savant-idiot. The classic American savant-idiot, surely, was Susan Sontag. This is the Susan Sontag who called white civilization "the cancer of human history";

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.

The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.

I love to read the way people love to watch television.

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.

Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or by duplication

Only thing that counts are ideas. Behind ideas are [moral] principles. Either one is serious or one is not. Must be prepared to make sacrifices. I'm not a liberal.

To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.

Loeb has been doing wonderfully patient work, exploring the American conscience from the inside. I regard him as something of a national treasure.

I always tell my students: A style is a means of insisting on something. A line of Sontag's.

Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!