Literary Birthday – 2 April – Camille Paglia

Happy Birthday, Camille Paglia, born 2 April 1947.

10 Quotes

1. Poetry is the way into a spiritual vision of society and the universe.
2. If people want to be better writers, they can’t just read the blogs! You’ve got to look at something that’s outside this rushing world of evanescent words.
3. I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word.
4. Charisma is the radiance produced by the interaction of male and female elements in a gifted personality. The charismatic woman has a masculine force and severity. The charismatic man has an entrancing female beauty. Both are hot and cold, glowing with pre-sexual self love.
5. Madonna can still produce a catchy pop song, but she hasn’t expanded her artistic vocabulary since the 1990s. Her concerts are glitzy extravaganzas of special effects overkill. She leaves little space in them for emotional depth or unscripted rapport with the audience.
6. Rule of art: Can’t kills creativity!
7. We cannot have a world where everyone is a victim. “I’m this way because my father made me this way. I’m this way because my husband made me this way.” Yes, we are indeed formed by traumas that happen to us. But you must take charge, you must take over, you are responsible.
8. Men chase by night those they will not greet by day.
9. It is woman’s destiny to rule men. Not to serve them, flatter them, or hang on them for guidance. Nor to insult them, demean them, or stereotype them as oppressors.
10. No teacher has any business telling the young about the present: the young are the present and they are making the future day by day. Every teacher, the moment that he or she steps from the classroom, is already history.

Camille Paglia is an American author, teacher, and social critic. She wrote Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, a best-selling work of literary criticism, among other books and essays. She writes articles on art, popular culture, feminism, and politics.

Source for photo: Fronteiras do Pensamento, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Crop_(2)_of_Camille_Paglia_no_Fronteiras_do_Pensamento_S%C3%A3o_Paulo_2015.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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