513 Quotes by Camille Paglia

To whom does he owe ultimate re- sponsibility? Since Romanticism, we have expected the artist not to celebrate God, king, family, and established values but to break taboos, to explore his or her deepest, most socially forbidden self.

The stigma of the prostitute is the badge of her identity. That is why the client goes to her. If he wanted someone without a stigma, he’d go and screw the lady next door.

Madonna’s great instinctive intelligence was evident to me from her earliest videos.

Woman’s sexuality is disruptive of the dully mechanical workaday world, in which efficiency means uniformity. The problems of woman’s entrance into the career system spring from more than male chauvinism. She brings nature into the social realm, which may be too small to contain it.

Hollywood, America’s greatest modern contribution to world culture, is a business, a religion, an art form, and a state of mind.

The most successful prostitutes are invisible, because the sign of a prostitute’s success is her absolute blending with the environment. She’s so shrewd, she never becomes visible. She never gets in trouble. She has command of her life, and her clients.

The only thing that will be remembered about my enemies after they’re dead is the nasty things I’ve said about them.

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.

All roads from Rousseau lead to Sade.