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“... on the bandwagon now, and it wasn’t much of a bandwagon to start with. If cinephilia is dead, as Susan Sontag some time ago suggested it was, who cares about the simultaneous death of two cinéastes? Still, no reader of signs can resist a coincidence, the image of a meaning that can’t be there. Michelangelo Antonioni (born 1912) and Ingmar Bergman ...”

“... photographs with portraits of Burroughs, Thek, John Ashbery, Divine, John Waters and others. Susan Sontag, whose reclining portrait is there too, wrote a preface for the book from her hospital bed, the night before her first surgery for breast cancer. They fell out after Sontag published On Photography the ...”

“... in view of the sheer difficulty of finding anything really susceptible to being written about. As Susan Sontag remarks, ‘the thoughtful – as distinct from the inarticulate – may have good reason to be wary, anxious, at a loss (for words).’ She endorses Valéry’s obiter dicta, ‘One must always apologise for talking about painting,’ and: ‘A ...”

“... each name:Gloria Steinem – phoneyJanet Malcolm – pretentiousRenata Adler – crackpotSusan Sontag – nobodyNora Ephron – liarOther hand:Kenneth Tynan – creepTruman Capote – leechGeorge Plimpton – slickTom Wolfe – talentlessPhilip Roth – jerkIt was a mercy she only had two hands. To be fair, there were some men she liked. They tended to be ...”

“... and real people (Kathy Acker, David Bowie, Connie Converse) in the fiction, and real people (Susan Sontag, Fleur Jaeggy, Kaitlin Phillips) in the real endnotes. Lacey has said her intent was random and irreverent – ‘There’s no hidden agenda or code,’ she told the New York Times – but it is also pragmatic. How many novels about artists fail ...”

“... women writers.’ Furthermore, he told a large audience, ‘there are not that many women, like Susan Sontag, who are intellectuals first, poets and novelists second.’ Since ‘more men ... are deeply interested in intellectual matters than women,’ he concluded, to have invited more women simply for the sake of fairness would have meant ‘lowering ...”

“... And he became a writer in another sense, converted writing –‘his one great subject’, as Susan Sontag says – into his central practice, an embodiment or evocation of his concerns rather than a description of them. He stopped, as he said, writing on subjects – ‘It is that “on” which bothers me’ – even on the subject of writing. His ...”

“... silence one keeps.’ They are all, it turns out, a little different, and none of them pure or (as Susan Sontag put it) raw. Among the artists in Invisible perhaps Andy Warhol, already a walking void of sorts, gets closest. In 1985, at the Area nightclub in New York, he stood briefly on a white plinth and then was photographed beside the ‘invisible ...”

“... woman with a crew-like haircut, masculine voice and a marvellous mind.’ An investigation into Susan Sontag conducted at Hoover’s request went on for four years and yielded little beyond Sontag’s résumé, her travels (most of which resulted in published articles), and a record of her anti-war activities, which ...”

“... 17 September) there are writings, culled from various sources, by Julian Barnes, James Fenton, Susan Sontag, William Boyd, Bruce Chatwin, Bruce Bernard and Colm Tóibín (Barnes has also made a loan to the exhibition). Some are affectionately biographical. Comparisons between Hodgkin’s art of memory and Proust’s are made.* The pleasure the ...”

“... war, trauma, damage, memory, lost love. But we shouldn’t do this too simply or too directly. Susan Sontag was right to say that Muriel, like the other films, does ‘not go to the end, either of the idea or the emotion which inspires them’; but not going to end, in this case, seems to be just the meticulously studied point. There is no end, and ...”

“... Let’s​ start with her life, which is as operatically strange as the fiction. Susan Taubes was born Judit Zsuzánna Feldmann in Budapest in 1928. Her father was one of Freud’s disciples; his father was chief rabbi of Budapest. At the age of eleven, she and her father left Hungary for the United States (her mother stayed behind to marry someone else) and watched from afar as the German occupation demolished their home city ...”

“... We don’t admire​ Simone Weil because we agree with her, Susan Sontag argued in 1963: ‘I cannot believe that more than a handful of the tens of thousands of readers she has won since the posthumous publication of her books and essays really share her ideas.’ What we admire, Sontag thought, is her extreme seriousness, her absolute effort to become ‘excruciatingly identical with her ideas’, to make herself a person who is ‘rightly regarded as one of the most uncompromising and troubling witnesses to the modern travail of the spirit ...”

“... had been jailed for two weeks in 2000 for the ‘illegal publication’ of the journal Tendency. Susan Sontag, whom Bei had published, wrote about what happened in the New York Times, and a threatened ten-year sentence became exile. GAPP said that they would boycott the fair if Bei and other dissidents participated, and so they were uninvited. Bei spoke ...”

“... expert masturbation of her pet unicorn with the crook of her elbow. In her Notes on ‘Camp’ Susan Sontag might almost have substituted ‘Beardsley’ for ‘camp’ wherever the term occurs: Beardsley is a certain mode of aestheticism ... Beardsley’s art is often decorative art, emphasising texture, sensuous surface and style at the expense of ...”