Camille Quotes

Out with stereotypes, feminism proclaims. But stereotypes are the west's stunning sexual personae, the vehicles of art's assault against nature. The moment there is imagination, there is myth.

Male urination really is a kind of accomplishment, an arc of transcendance. A woman merely waters the ground she stands on.

Anti-religious sneers are a hallmark of perpetual adolescents.

Set up your study or picture in an orderly fashion. This order should not cramp either the linearist or the colorist... Never lose sight of that first impression by which you were moved.

Be guided by feeling alone. We are only simple mortals, subject to error...

But as I see it, the most corrupt art is the sentimental the art of orange blossoms which make pale women swoon.

Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity.

Male aggression and lust are the energizing factors in culture. They are men's tools of survival in the pagan vastness of female nature.

What is Mona Lisa thinking? Nothing, of course. Her blankness is her menace and our fear. [...] Walter Pater is to call her a 'vampire,' coasting through history on her secret tasks.

Heaven help the American-born boy with a talent for ballet.

It is not male hatred of women but male fear of women that is the great universal.

Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.

I guess I'm just a natural warrior.

Science is a method of logical analysis of nature's operations. It has lessened human anxiety about the cosmos by demonstrating the materiality of nature's forces, and their frequent predictability.

It's patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman.

Male mastery in marriage is a social illusion, nurtured by women exhorting their creations to play and walk. At the emotional heart of every marriage is a pietà of mother and son.

Even a woman of abnormal will cannot escape her hormonal identity.

We live in a period of declining stars. Few celebrities these days (aside from the smoldering Angelina Jolie) seem to have complex psychic lives.

Personality maintains its discreetness by an act of will. Otherwise one person will flow helplessly into another.

The unhappy truth is that male homosexuality will never be fully accepted by the heterosexual majority, who are obeying the dictates not of bigoted society or religion but of procreative nature.

Modernization means Westernization.

If you are nice, and keep your promise, we will be in paradise.

Don't fear anything for your letters, they are burnt one by one and I hope you do the same with mine.

Send me one hundred francs on our future deals, otherwise I will disappear in a cataclysm.

I have all sorts of problems and feel discouraged.

When you left on Saturday, I felt a horrible void, I saw you everywhere, on the beach, in your room, in the garden: impossible for me to get used to the idea that you had left.

If the existence of human beings leads to nothing, what is all this comedy about?

There are men who would be afraid to commit themselves on the doctrine that castor oil is a laxative.

I think my work is about the different strategies man has invented to deal with desire, frustration, fear of death, exhaustion. It's very much about life on earth.

Our presence in Afghanistan is not worth the price of any more American lives or treasure.

It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation.

Capitalism is an art form.

When it defines man as the enemy, feminism is alienating women from their own bodies.

Children are monsters of unbridled egotism and will, for they spring directly from nature, hostile intimations of immorality.

Repression is an evolutionary adaptation permitting us to function under the burden of our expanded consciousness. For what we are conscious of could drive us mad.

Paint the essential character of things.

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.

My generation of the Sixties, with all our great ideals, destroyed liberalism, because of our excesses.

The so-called miracle of birth is nature getting her own way.

I remember that, although I was full of fervour, I didn't have the slightest inkling, even at forty, of the deeper side to the movement we were pursuing by instinct. It was in the air!

It does not astonish me that the critics in London relegate me to the lowest rank. Alas! I fear that they are only too justified!

It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman.

Men chase by night those they will not greet by day.

Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.

I began to understand my sensations, to know what I wanted, at around the age of forty - but only vaguely.

Do console your poor friend, who is so troubled to see his paintings so miserable, so sad, next to the radiant nature he has before his eyes!

Pregnancy demonstrates the deterministic character of woman's sexuality.

Despite crime's omnipresence, things work in society, because biology compels it. Order eventually restores itself, by psychic equilibrium.

Minerva save us from the cloying syrup of coercive compassion! What feminism does not need, it seems to me, is an endless recycling of Doris Day Fifties clichés about noble womanhood.

I sometimes have a horrible fear of turning up a canvas of mine. I'm always afraid of finding a monster in place of the precious jewels I thought I had put there!