The fashion industry certainly has its obscene sides. The cost of a coat can be obscene. So can the cost of a photo shoot if you're working with a really good photographer.
The vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connexion of thought.
As a writer, I've often said that, among the other things that we need to reclaim, other than the obscene wealth of billionaires, is language. Language has been deployed to mean the exact opposite of what it really means when they talk about democracy or freedom.
To me, the most obscene word in our language is celibacy.
I imagine like most of us that I'd like obscene amounts of money but the people I met and worked with who have those obscene amounts of money and have obscene amounts of fame have awful lives. Really. I mean hideously compromised lives.
I imagine like most of us that I'd like obscene amounts of money but the people I met and worked with who have those obscene amounts of money and have obscene amounts of fame have awful lives. Really. I mean hideously compromised lives. And I can go anywhere. No one knows who I am.
There is a narrow class of uses of language where you intend to communicate. Communication refers to an effort to get people to understand what one means. And that, certainly, is one use of language and a social use of it. But I don't think it is the only social use of language. Nor are social uses the only uses of language.
One sacrifice has to be made: never use harsh or rude language. Foul language you can use; foul language doesn't hurt. Foul language is forgivable (though it is bad). But rude language cannot be forgiven.
Nothing that is expressed is obscene. What is obscene is what is hidden.
Perhaps there is such a thing as obscene sex, but I know that violence is always obscene. So I don't get it, that you can disembowel a woman but you can't see her tits. Who made that up? That's sick!
It is only the great men who are truly obscene. If they had not dared to be obscene, they could never have dared to be great.
Also, they don't understand - writing is language. The use of language. The language to create image, the language to create drama. It requires a skill of learning how to use language.
I feel impelled to speak today in a language that in a sense is new-one which I, who have spent so much of my life in the military profession, would have preferred never to use. That new language is the language of atomic warfare.
It is not pornography that is obscene, it is hunger that is obscene.
Homer's whole language, the language in which he lived, the language that he breathed, because he never saw it, or certainly those who formed his tradition never saw it, in characters on the pages. It was all on the tongue and in the ear.
The human body is not obscene, sexuality is not obscene. But it [pornography] is not sex, it is violence. It encourages acceptance of the idea that violence is a legitimate part of sexuality.