By Taylor Jasmine | On April 21, 2024 | Updated April 12, 2025 | Comments (0)
Mae West (1893 – 1980) earned international fame as an actress and singer, but she was also a talented playwright and screenwriter. In fact, it was she who wrote all the clever and sometimes bawdy quips that were her stock in trade. This collection of Mae West quotes gathers some of her wittiest and best known.
At one point in the 1930s, Mae was the highest-earning woman in the U.S. Constantly doing battle with censors, she famously said, “I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it.” Mae created her iconic persona, and behind it was her desire to poke holes in stodgy convention and hypocrisy.
The American Film Institute named her the 15th greatest female screen legend, an honor she richly deserved. When her film career wound down, she continued to write books and plays. Read More→
Kamala Das (1934 – 2009), the Indian author and poet, was far ahead of her time. Even after her death, her words continue to hold much of relevance for Indian women — and perhaps for women across the world.
In addition to her poetry, she was known for her short stories as well as her autobiography, My Story. Here we’ll explore quotes from My Story, a book both widely admired as well as controversial.
Kamala Das (later known as Kamala Surayya) believed in living life on her own terms, and this reveals itself in her writings. Her confessional poetry style wasn’t one readily adopted by Indian poets, least of all women. Her English poetry has been compared to that of Anne Sexton’s and won her recognition and literary awards during her lifetime. Read More→
By Nancy Snyder | On June 10, 2022 | Updated February 9, 2025 | Comments (0)
The selection of quotes by bell hooks presented here are arranged by her favored themes encompassed in a new vision of love The intersection of race, patriarchy, feminism, and capitalism, demonstrate how these elements determine lives and the hope that comes with resistance.
When the extraordinarily prolific and brilliant writer bell hooks passed away in December 2021, she left behind a tremendous gift for her countless readers: a legacy of thirty adult non-fiction works that will satisfy every reader of this deep thinker and cultural commentator.
In examining the life of bell hooks, there is much to discover about the wisdom in her work. It provides the potential to change every reader’s life and perspective. Read More→
By Melanie P. Kumar | On January 18, 2022 | Updated March 17, 2023 | Comments (2)
The following selection of quotes by Joan Didion highlights her unique talent at examining life — its joys, sorrows, and challenges.
There are hugely influential writers who inspire others within their lifetimes, and Joan Didion ( 1934 – 2021 ) was certainly one of them. But it’s after her passing that everything she wrote seems to resonate even more, because we realize that there will be no further words of wisdom.
Photo above right by Katherine Ballard, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. In her tribute to Joan Didion upon her passing, Nancy Snyder wrote,
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By Taylor Jasmine | On May 13, 2021 | Updated August 27, 2022 | Comments (0)
From the time of her classic essay, “Notes on Camp” (1963), Susan Sontag was launched into the position of one of America’s premier public intellectuals. Nearly every line she wrote or spoke was quotable, so it’s a great challenge to choose a selection of quotes by Susan Sontag for a post that’s reasonable in length; here, we’ve attempted such a feat.
Achieving fame (and sometimes notoriety) in multiple forms of media — essays, fiction, film, and more — Sontag seemed to embrace her role as provocateur. Susan Sontag pastel portrait at right by Juan Bastos.
In her biography of Susan Sontag on this site, Nancy Snyder writes that she “achieved what was believed to be impossible for any American writer: she could easily pontificate on structuralist philosophy and on the history of interpretation — subjects not widely embraced in American culture — yet Sontag easily made the crossover from the inaccessible intellectual into the realm of established literary star.” Read More→
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