Camille Paglia Quotes

The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff.

The average English critic is a don manqué, hopelessly parochial when not exaggeratedly teutonophile, over whose desk must surely hang the motto (presumably in Gothic lettering) "Above all no enthusiasm".

THE British are brave people. They can face anything, except reality.

Loeb has been doing wonderfully patient work, exploring the American conscience from the inside. I regard him as something of a national treasure.

Even now in America, you know, when people say they hate immigrants, they're not referring to a Canadian immigrant. You know, they're not referring to somebody who has an accent who's slightly different to theirs.

It's nothing but a big stroke job in this country. The government strokes you every day of your life. Religion never stops stroking you. Big business gives you a good stroke. And it's one big, transcontinental, cross-country, red, white and blue stroke job... Do you know what the national emblem for this country ought to be? Forget that bald eagle. The national emblem of this country ought to be Uncle Sam standing naked at attention saluting, and seated on a chair next to him, the Statue of Liberty jerking him off. That would be a good symbol for the United Strokes of America.

Critics I don't understand. They get too intellectual. They're not very well-versed in street talk; it takes them longer to say it. So they have to do it in dictionaries and they take longer to say it.

The English and Americans dislike only some Irish--the same Irish that the Irish themselves detest, Irish writers--the ones that think.

Great critics, of whom there are piteously few, build a home for the truth.

Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.

If we are ever to construct a feminist movement that is not based on the premise that men and women are always at war with one another, then we must be willing to acknowledge the appropriateness of complex critical responses to writing by men even if it is sexist. Clearly women can learn from writers whose work is sexist, even be inspired by it, because sexism may be simply one dimension of that work. Concurrently fiercely critiquing the sexism does not mean that one does not value the work.

RUBBISH, n. Worthless matter, such as the religions, philosophies, literatures, arts and sciences of the tribes infesting the regions lying due south from Boreaplas.

Ah, genre. A word only a Frenchman could love.

To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.

I like to think about the bestseller list as, "This is the medicine cabinet of a very sick country." Let me look and see what they're reading that isn't nourishing them.

If the poet can no longer speak for society, but only for himself, then we are at the last ditch.

A love of tradition has never weakened a nation.

Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism. It is actually the opposite of Conservatism, since it is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same.

The quality of the thought differences the Egyptian and the Roman, the Austrian and the American.

Civilization is not an incurable disease, but it should never be forgotten that the English people are at present afflicted by it.

In these days of intellectual awakening and steadily asserting public opinion, the holy places of the Hindus, their condition, and method of work have not escaped tile keen eye of criticism; and this city, being the holy of holies to all Hindus, has not failed to attract its full share of censure.

England is never in a hurry because she is eternal.

What two ideas are more inseparable than beer and Britannia?

Americans, Poles, and the nations of Europe value individual freedom and sovereignty. We must work together to confront forces, whether they come from inside or out, from the South or the East, that threaten over time to undermine the values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith and tradition that make us who we are.

Frederick Buechner can find grace and redemption even in the shoddiest, phoniest aspects of a cultural wasteland. One reads Lion Country...with hope and delight.