Quotes

[on the 1960s as portrayed in 'Mad Men'] To my mind, the picture is too crude and the artist too pleased with himself. Everyone chain-smokes, every executive starts drinking before lunch, every man is a chauvinist pig, every male employee viciously competitive and jealous of his colleagues, every white person a reflexive racist (when not irritatingly patronizing). It's not that you don't know that, say, sexism was rampant in the workplace before the feminist movement. It's just that, on the screen, the endless succession of leering junior execs and crude jokes and abusive behavior all meant to signal 'sexism' doesn't work - it's wearying rather than illuminating.

Literature does possess a genre that strives to be both objective and personal, an accurate record and a subjective testimony, a representation and an interpretation at the same time, and it's the genre at which Sontag really excelled: criticism.

One of the strange and sometimes disconcerting pleasures of getting older is finding out how radically your once favorite (or hated) characters can change.

[on the film Avatar (2009)] In this fantasy of a lusciously colorful trip over the rainbow, you don 't have to wake up. 'There's no place like home' has become 'there's no need for home'.

I cared more about what happened to the people in 'Friday Night Lights' after one episode than I did for anyone in 'Mad Men' after four seasons.