Quote

I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.

Camille Paglia

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Camille Paglia
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: April 2
Art Historian
Essayist
Film Critic
Journalist
Literary Critic
Professor
Teacher
Writer
Endicott
New York
Camille Anna Paglia
Things
Certainly
Tracking
Like
Poetry
Scrutiny
Writer
Derived
Word
Prose
Words
Schools
Individual
Anymore
School
Roots
Writing
Skills

More quotes by Camille Paglia

Image
Society is a system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to nature. We may alter these forms, slowly or suddenly, but no change in society will change nature.
Camille Paglia
Image
As a major contemporary composer, Madonna should not let the eye dictate to the ear.
Camille Paglia
Image
We live in a period of declining stars. Few celebrities these days (aside from the smoldering Angelina Jolie) seem to have complex psychic lives.
Camille Paglia
Image
Television is actually closer to reality than anything in books. The madness of TV is the madness of human life.
Camille Paglia
Image
What has been forgotten is that there were major intellectual breakthroughs in the 1960s, thanks to North American writers of an older generation. There was a rupture in continuity, since most young people influenced by those breakthroughs did not enter the professions.
Camille Paglia
Image
There is no gay leader anywhere near the stature of Martin Luther King, because black activism drew on the profound spiritual tradition of the church, to which gay political rhetoric is childishly hostile.
Camille Paglia
Image
There's something retro about your persona. It's like the pre-World War II generation of reporters - those unpretentious, working-class guys who hung around saloons and used rough language. Now they've all been replaced with these effete Ivy League elitists who swarm over the current media. Nerds - utterly dull and insipid.
Camille Paglia
Image
Cats are autocrats of naked self-interest. They are both amoral and immoral, consciously breaking rules. Their ''evil'' look at such times is no human projection: the cat may be the only animal who savors the perverse or reflects upon it
Camille Paglia
Image
Homosexuality is not 'normal' On the contrary it is a challenge to the norm...Nature exists whether academics like it or not. And in nature, procreation is the single relentless rule. That is the norm. Our sexual bodies were designed for reproduction...No one is born gay. The idea is ridiculous...homosexuality is an adaptation, not an inborn trait.
Camille Paglia
Image
Because of my own family's service (in the U.S. Army, Navy, and Massachusetts and New York National Guard), I am a strong supporter of the military and do believe that there are just wars.
Camille Paglia
Image
The more woman aims for personal identity and autonomy ... the fiercer will be her struggle with nature - that is, with the intractable physical laws of her own body. And the more nature will punish her: 'Do not dare to be free! For your body does not belong to you.'
Camille Paglia
Image
Lesbian feminists, for all their ideals of sisterhood and solidarity, can treat each other with a fickleness, a parasitic exploitativeness, and vicious spite that have to be seen to be believed.
Camille Paglia
Image
The North American intellectual tradition began, I maintain, in the encounter of British Romanticism with assertive, pragmatic North American English - the Protestant plain style in both the U.S. and Canada, with its no-nonsense Scottish immigrants.
Camille Paglia
Image
government has no business intervening in any consensual private behavior.
Camille Paglia
Image
The idea that emotion can be separated from sex is a Christian illusion, one of the most ingenious but finally unworkable strategies in Christianity's ancient campaign against pagan nature.
Camille Paglia
Image
Pornography is human imagination in tense theatrical action its violations are a protest against the violations of our freedom by nature.
Camille Paglia
Image
In the theory of gender I began from zero. There is no masculine power or privilege I did not covet. But slowly, step by step, decade by decade, I was forced to acknowledge that even a woman of abnormal will cannot escape her hormonal identity.
Camille Paglia
Image
Far from poisoning the mind, pornography shows the deepest truth about sexuality, stripped of romantic veneer.
Camille Paglia
Image
Straight men who visit prostitutes are valiantly striving to keep sex free from emotion, duty, family--in other words, from society, religion, and procreative Mother Nature.
Camille Paglia
Image
Anyone who gets his or her political news primarily from the New York Times (which made the ethically challenged carpetbagger Hillary a senator) is a fool.
Camille Paglia