The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism. Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.

Madonna's great instinctive intelligence was evident to me from her earliest videos.

Every revolution eventually needs a new revolution.

There is such a thing as seduction, and it needs encouragement rather than discouragement in our puritanical Anglo-American world.

Society is an artificial construction, a defense against nature's power.

I regard affirmative action as pernicious - a system that had wonderful ideals when it started but was almost immediately abused for the benefit of white middle-class women.

Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future.