I grew up in the Fifties and early Sixties, which were still quite conservative, and I wasn't given any information about sex or anything like that... I went out with girls at school because one had to. I didn't experiment with sex for quite a long time.
There is a brief time for sex, and a long time when sex is out of place. But when it is out of place as an activity there still should be the large and quiet space in the consciousness where it lives quiescent. Old people can have a lovely quiescent sort of sex, like apples, leaving the young quite free for their sort.
In high school I had sex with girls quite a few times. They were straight women who I convinced to jump in the sack with me.
Sex is hard to write about because you lose the universal and succumb to the particular. We all have our different favorites. Good sex is impossible to write about. Lawrence and Updike have given it their all, and the result is still uneasy and unsure. It may be that good sex is something fiction just can't do - like dreams. Most of the sex in my novels is absolutely disastrous. Sex can be funny, but not very sexy.
I mean, you can't have sex until you're married if you're Mormon. The first time I had sex, my parents found out. They were listening in on the phone while I was talking about sex to my girlfriend. They freaked out, man. They both cornered me in my bedroom.
If you had a daily printout from the brain of an average twenty-four-year-old male, it would probably go like this: sex, need coffee, sex, traffic, sex, sex, what an asshole, sex, ham sandwich, sex, sex, etc
I didn't have sex until I was 23 and that was with a man. I made up for lost time after that in a hurry. I wish I could have had sex when I was, like, 14, 15 or 16 because that's such an exciting age to have sex.
Cross-generational sex is the phenomenon in which young girls are given material goods in exchange for sex. All girls are vulnerable to it, particularly orphans.
The thing about drugs and sex is that you lose all your inhibitions. I've had sex in trains, planes, wine bars... and quite a few car parks!
I was actually losing about a pound a week which was really wonderful. It was a really nice, and good, and healthy way to do it. And I still got to eat my chocolate every day which was wonderful, although I haven't had a drink in a really, really, really long time. I love being outside and working out, and I sometimes jog with my husband, and sometimes I jog with one of my daughter's best friends, and it's incredible. I was able to do Pilates for the first time in my life, which is almost better than sex. Not quite, but almost.
The Englishman can get along with sex quite perfectly so long as he can pretend that it isn't sex but something else.
I'm so old that when I started keeping a diary they were in actual books, and I think that's one the reasons that I've never written about sex. Because early on you had to worry that someone was going to find your diary, so it's bad enough to be writing like Joan Didion, but writing like Joan Didion about sex acts you'd performed with somebody you had known for 20 minutes, that's a bit worse. So I would write in my diary, "I met J. and we had sex five times last night." But I would never write about what we did.
In your thirties, you're much more comfortable with sex. First of all, sex is something you've done more. You know you can have sex just to have sex; you can have sex with friends; you can have sex with people you love; you can have sex with people you don't like, but the sex is good. And you can joke about sex much more.
Sexuality in girls isn't explored as much as it should be. Everyone gets freaked out - it's quite a taboo thing for girls to wanna have sex
War to me is very much like sex. You can develop a theory that says sex is primarily for the exchange of genetic material, or that it's a celebration of life, or you can make up 50,000 theories about why human beings have sex, all of which are in some sense true, all of which by themselves miss the point. Because the answer is extraordinarily complex. It may be for fun, it may be for reproduction, for financial reasons, any number of things.
The British often shy away from any cinematic interpretation of real sex. They sometimes have what I call "subtle sex," which is really introspective and has soft music in the background. Either that or it's played for comedy. The British are kind of hung up about sex. They find it kind of titillating and they make jokes about it because they're nervous.
I think I can adapt quite easily from having a Spanish mother and an English dad and growing up in both places. I feel like I've got two lives - that Spanish life, which was so free, and then I lived in England and went to an all-girls, private school and had to fit in with that. That switching out and becoming someone else, I find it quite liberating, actually.