There are moments when you have to write certain things and you don't have to think of your sex. If you are writing about the population of the thirteenth district in Paris, even if you are writing on the women in the thirteenth district, there's no need to consider your sex.
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.
I'd really like to see smart sex writing, writing that can take sex apart and try to put it back together, that doesn't just put a box around "sex writing" and give it glaring neon lights but assumes that sex is part of everything else in our lives.
There are 10,000 local governments in the state of New York. Ten thousand! Town, village, lighting district, water district, sewer district, a special district to count the other districts in case you missed a district.
When I first started writing, there was no way I'd write a sex scene. That just seemed impossible. That's why in "Fight Club" all the sex happens off-screen. It's all just a noise on the other side of the wall or the ceiling. I just couldn't bring to write in a scene like that. So one of the challenges with "Choke" was I wanted to write sex scenes until I was really comfortable just writing them in a very mechanical way.
We're used to seeing fantasy explored from a male perspective, and the way men might see sex, have sex, want sex and even be addicted to sex. But I don't think women pursuing that sexuality within themselves is something that's talked about or experienced as often.
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.
Charlotte Bronte was writing about sex. I supposed Jane Austen was, too. Where do you get a hero like Darcy unless you are writing about sex?
The difficulty of writing about sex, for women, is that sex is best when not thought about, not analysed.
I consider that sex is part of life as much as architecture, fashion, art or food. Sex is life, simple. And I refuse to consider that sex should be hidden. When you hide sex, problems start because sex becomes dangerous.
I have certain moral parameters that I do not cross in writing; I don't write about adultery or kids having premarital 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
Sex education pretty much taught me about how my body works, why certain things happen when I'm around girls, and what sex was, and I think that there's a lack of clarity between sex and love - a lot of people think it's the same thing when it's not.
I don't write about sex because it's not really my subject. I love it when other people write about it, but it's not my subject, and I don't want anyone I've had sex with to write about it. Plus, you're in front of an audience, and they picture wherever you're writing about. I'm 52; no one in the audience wants to picture that.
One of the things that`s offensive is saying in the fifth district there`s nothing going on. This is a very vast district. The congressman happens to represent me. And while there are always more things that we can do in every community, this is a very diverse district with all kinds of wonderful things.
[Demystifying lesbian sex for an interviewer] In a way, the sex isn't really that different... From what I can tell, no, not really. All the things that men and women do together, think of everything that men and women do together, women and women can do together. And that makes you realize that sex is just simply about connecting with another person, or about intimacy.
Women who write with an overriding consciousness that they write as women are engaged not in aspiration toward writing, but chiefly in a politics of sex.