"Blameless, shameless. The more desperate the eroticism, the more hopelessly women show off their heavy breasts, opening their mouths and screaming out, the greater the attraction. In contrast, a promise of light awaits at the limits of the mystical outlook. I find this unbearable and soon returned to insolence and erotic vomit - which doesn't respect anybody or anything. How sweet to enter filthy night and proudly wrap myself in it. The whore I went with was as uncomplicated as a child and she hardly talked. There was another one, who came crashing down from a tabletop - sweet, shy, heartbreakingly tender, as I watched her with drunken, unfeeling eyes."

His worst writings are a kind of wannabe [de] Sade, texts whose apparent inspiration lay less in their subject matter than in their subject matter's anticipated ability to shock and appall. On the other hand, his best writings are intellectual tours de force that are to philosophy what fisting is to a virgin anus. If Sade was a more original prose writer than philosopher, Bataille was the opposite: a radical thinker whose prose skills sometimes failed to present his ideas with that Cartesian clarity the French pride themselves on. While this was probably not deliberate on Bataille's part, it did evince a certain irony: if his project was to embrace the waste products of society, why write in a manner condoned by tradition?

"He [Bataille] emphazied the irrational in opposition to the rational, the erotic as opposed to bourgeois morality, celebration of excesses as opposed to capitalist restraint, transgression as opposed to conformity.”

guardian review of biography