Camille Paglia Quotes

I have been photographing people dancing for 20 or 30 years now, and I think I will eventually do a book of dancing photos.

Overhearing people's conversations about art - that's always entertaining.

People put clips of me up. There are quotes from me. I've written books, of course. I'm on Twitter. There are dozens of ways to consume my offerings, and a lecture in a large venue is really only just one of them. So I have no concerns about how much access people would have to me no matter what is the capacity of your pocketbook.

If you want to say something and have people listen then you have to wear a mask. If you want to be honest then you have to live a lie.

My books and other works are my legacy, and it's a great comfort to know that mine is a legacy of pleasure for other people.

When I go to places and do book tours, I don't really like doing traditional bookshops. It's nice to walk people through something instead of just standing up in a bookstore.

I imagine the earth when I am no more: Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley. Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born, Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.

In spite the mountains of books written about art, no precise definition of art has been constructed. And the reason for this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.

I've always been very opinionated, for lack of a better term, about art. Not to sound too arrogant, but I guess I'm a connoisseur of telling people what I think is good and bad.

I don't think I'm essentially interested in children's books. I'm interested in writing, and in pictures. I'm interested in people and in children because they are people.

When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.

People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television; they prefer books.

I know from an early age that I'm very comfortable in front of people. When I was a young girl, I'd love giving book reports.

I've written one book-length piece of journalism. The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed Bishop Gerardi? That book had an impact. Eight years after it was published it's still having an impact in Guatemala. I remember when I wrote it, a surprising number of people said things to me like, "That is such an amazing story; why didn't you turn it into a novel?"

It is a gratification to me to know that I am ignorant of art... Because people who understand art find nothing in pictures but blemishes.

Enough of Art. It's Art that kills us. People no longer want to do painting: they make art.

A work of art is an echo chamber which repeats what people say about it.

Art is difficult. It's not entertainment. There are only a few people who can say something about art - it's very restricted. When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it's art or not. Buying art is not understanding art.

The only people who get paid what they're worth are people who don't follow the instruction book, who create art, who are innovative, who work without a map.

Books to judicious compilers, are useful; to particular arts and professions, they are absolutely necessary; to men of real science, they are tools: but more are tools to them.

I really don't know what's good or bad art because all the art I like people tell me is tasteless.

Perfection bores me, in art, in music; most of all, in people. Luckily, perfection is rare.

Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.

Furthermore, what profit was it to me that I, rascally slave of selfish ambitions that I was, read and understood by myself as many books as I could get concerning the so-called liberal arts?...I had turned my back to the light and my face to the things it illuminated, and so no light played upon my own face, or on the eyes that perceived them.

I wanted to create something that people could relate to without having read a book about it beforehand.