Quote

My advice to the reader approaching a poem is to make the mind still and blank. Let the poem speak. This charged quiet mimics the blank space ringing the printed poem, the nothing out of which something takes shape.

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
Stills
Shape
Still
Shapes
Mimics
Nothing
Advice
Ringing
Mind
Quiet
Charged
Something
Reader
Approaching
Make
Takes
Printed
Space
Blank
Speak
Poem

More quotes by Camille Paglia

Image
Pursuit and seduction are the essence of sexuality. It's part of the sizzle.
Camille Paglia
Image
The male orientation of classical Athens was inseparable from its genius. Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny.
Camille Paglia
Image
Except for naval and air exercises, our military should be stationed on American soil, where service men and women can lead normal lives in close proximity to family and friends.
Camille Paglia
Image
All objects, all phases of culture are alive. They have voices. They speak of their history and interrelatedness. And they are all talking at once!
Camille Paglia
Image
Woman is the dominant sex. Men have to do all sorts of stuff to prove that they are worthy of woman's attention.
Camille Paglia
Image
Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers.
Camille Paglia
Image
Considering the popularity of soaps with the African-American audience, it's grotesque that the entertainment industry, for all its vaunted liberalism, is lagging so far behind social changes in the United States. And why has there never been an all-black daytime network soap? It would probably blow the white soaps off the map.
Camille Paglia
Image
[Sarah] Palin is solidifying her status as a bona fide American cultural heroine.
Camille Paglia
Image
We will never get great art from women if their education exposes them only to the second-rate and if the idea of greatness itself is denied. Greatness is not a white male trick. Every important world civilization has defined its artistic tradition in elitist terms of distinction and excellence.
Camille Paglia
Image
Feminism, in all fields, has yet to produce a single scholar of the intellectual rank of scores of these learned men [e.g., Bruno Snell, Albin Lesky, Denys Page] in the German and British academic tradition.
Camille Paglia
Image
I admire hard-bitten, wisecracking realism of Ida Lupino and the film noir heroines. I'm sick of simpering white girls with their princess fantasies.
Camille Paglia
Image
Madonna is the true feminist. She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode. Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising control over their lives.
Camille Paglia
Image
Every revolution eventually needs a new revolution.
Camille Paglia
Image
At the opening of the Odyssey, Telemachus, inspired by the male-born Athena, searches for his father by turning against his mother. Jesus too publicly spurns his mother to be about his father's business. Male adulthood begins with the breaking of female chains.
Camille Paglia
Image
Men knew that if they devirginized a woman, they could end up dead within twenty-four hours. These controls have been removed.
Camille Paglia
Image
All great stars are competitive. That's a sign of a true artist - if you don't have the fire of competition deep down inside, you're never going to achieve anything. You have to want to be king of the heap.
Camille Paglia
Image
Capitalism is an art form, an Apollonian fabrication to rival nature. It is hypocritical for feminists and intellectuals to enjoy the pleasures and conveniences of capitalism while sneering at it. Everyone born into capitalism has incurred a debt to it. Give Caesar his due.
Camille Paglia
Image
Every month, it is woman's fate to face the abyss of time and being, the abyss which is herself.
Camille Paglia
Image
I view the prostitute as one of the few women who is totally in control of her fate, totally in control of the realm of sex. The lesbian feminists tried to take control of female sexuality away from men - but the prostitute was doing that all along.
Camille Paglia
Image
Teenage boys, goaded by their surging hormones run in packs like the primal horde. They have only a brief season of exhilarating liberty between control by their mothers and control by their wives.
Camille Paglia