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.
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.
I can't imagine otherwise - I guess Virginia Woolf could write wonderful novels where the women never have sex, and her novels work. But for me, I don't think I could write a plot without sex happening somewhere.
Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.
I admire some of the people on the screen today, but most of them look like everybody else. In our day we had individuality. Pictures were more sophisticated. All this nudity is too excessive and it is getting very boring. It will be a shame if it upsets people so much that it brings on the need for censorship. I hate censorship. In the cinema there's no mystery. No privacy. And no sex, either. Most of the sex I've seen on the screen looks like an expression of hostility towards sex.
I think sex is a very minor part of most romance novels.
Most people are interested in seeing 27-year-old women who are in movies somehow connected to sex. It's interesting to everyone. Especially little movies that are having trouble getting made, there's always sex.
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 like to know the places I write about. I feel like it helps me ground the novel. My novels are 'realistic novels,' but they can also be fantastical, so it's nice to have a setting that grounds them a little bit.
In many joyfully-admired recent novels, love appears as little more than sex-manual instruction.
I think there's a false division people sometimes make in describing literary novels, where there are people who write systems novels, or novels of ideas, and there are people who write about emotional things in which the movement is character driven. But no good novels are divisible in that way.
Most of the female 'superhero' role models of my childhood came from novels, and they rarely had powers. Take Dorothy, for example, from 'The Wizard of Oz;' or Laura Ingalls and her sisters in the 'Little House on the Prairie' novels.
Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.
I feel like people think of me as someone who really believes in a "sex as empowerment" philosophy, like Sasha Grey or something, when actually I feel like I'm much more what a lot of liberal feminists would call "sex negative" than most women I know.
I'm short and I have a big appetite. I can't do nothing just a little. It's the same with anything I do. It's very hard for me to love a little, have sex a little, to eat a little. I like to do everything, and I like to do it all the way that I want to do it.
Most people don't want to work in commercial sex. They have little choice.