QUOTES AND APHORISMS ON SEX

The Englishman can get along with sex quite perfectly so long as he can pretend that it isn't sex but something else.

James Agate (1877-1947, British author, critic)

A 'Bay Area Bisexual' told me I didn't quite coincide with either of her desires.

Woody Allen (1935-, American director, screenwriter, actor, comedian)

Sex is the most fun you can have without laughing.

Woody Allen (1935-, American director, screenwriter, actor, comedian)

You have to see the sex act comically, as a child.

W. H. Auden (1907-1973, Anglo-American poet)

Any idiot can get laid when they're famous. That's easy. It's getting laid when you're not famous that takes some talent.

Kevin Bacon (1958-, American actor)

Sex -- the great inequality, the great miscalculator, the great Irritator.

Enid Bagnold (1889-1981, British novelist, playwright)

The American ideal of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This idea has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden -- as an unpatriotic act -- that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.

James Baldwin (1924-1987, American author)

The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.

James Baldwin (1924-1987, American author)

I believe that organic sex, body against body, skin area against skin area, is becoming no longer possible, simply because if anything is to have any meaning for us it must take place in terms of the values and experiences of the media landscape. What we're getting is a whole new order of sexual fantasies, involving a different order of experiences, like car crashes, like travelling in jet aircraft, the whole overlay of new technologies, architecture, interior design, communications, transport, merchandising. These things are beginning to reach into our lives and change the interior design of our sexual fantasies. We've got to recognize that what one sees through the window of the TV screen is as important as what one sees through a window on the street.

J. G. Ballard (1930-, British author)

I've tried several varieties of sex. The conventional position makes me claustrophobic and the others give me a stiff neck or lockjaw.

Tallulah Bankhead (1903-1968, American actress)

Sex pleasure in woman is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken.

Simone De Beauvoir (1908-1986, French novelist, essayist)

The big difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs a lot less.

Brendan F. Behan (1923-1964, Irish writer)

Sexual liberation, as a slogan, turns out to be another kind of bondage. For a woman it offers orgasm as her ultimate and major fulfillment; it's better than motherhood.

Victoria Billings (1945-, American journalist, author)

Embraces are comminglings from the head even to the feet, and not a pompous high priest entering by a secret place.

William Blake (1757-1827, British poet, painter)

For once you must try not to shirk the facts: mankind is kept alive by bestial acts.

Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956, German dramatist, poet)

If the devil were to offer me a resurgence of what is commonly called virility, I'd decline. "Just keep my liver and lungs in good working order," I'd reply, "so I can go on drinking and smoking!"

Luis Bunuel (1900-1983, Spanish film director)

Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that matter. In fact, both homo -- and heterosexual experimental subjects have been conditioned to react sexually to an old boot, and you can save a lot of money that way.

William S. Burroughs (1914-1997, American writer)

It is true from early habit, one must make love mechanically as one swims; I was once very fond of both, but now as I never swim unless I tumble into the water, I don't make love till almost obliged.

Lord Byron (1788-1824, British poet)

The more developed sexual passion, in both sexes, is very largely an emotion of power, domination, or appropriation. There is no state of feeling that says "mine, mine," more fiercely.

Charles Horton Cooley (1864-1929, American sociologist)

We do not go to bed in single pairs; even if we choose not to refer to them, we still drag there with us the cultural impedimenta of our social class, our parents lives, our bank balances, our sexual and emotional expectations, our whole biographies -- all the bits and pieces of our unique existences.

Angela Carter (1940-1992, British author)

Every man has been brought up with the idea that decent women don't pop in and out of bed; he has always been told by his mother that "nice girls don't." He finds, of course, when he gets older that this may be untrue -- but only in a certain section of society.

Barbara Cartland (1901-2000, British novelist)

Much more than our other needs and endeavors, it is sexuality that puts us on an even footing with our kind: the more we practice it, the more we become like everyone else: it is in the performance of a reputedly bestial function that we prove our status as citizens: nothing is more public than the sexual act.

E. M. Cioran (1911-1995, Rumanian-born French philosopher)

In the beginning, I wanted to enter what was essentially a man's field. I wanted to prove I could do it. Then I found that when I did as well as the men in the field I got more credit for my work because I am a woman, which seems unfair.

Eugenie Clark (1922-, American marine biologist, author)

The real problem between the sexes is that for men, sex is a gender-underliner, they need it for their egos. We don't need sex to make us feel we are the person we need to be.

Carol Clewlow

I have yet to find a person who loves virtue as much as sex.

Confucius (BC 551-479, Chinese ethical teacher, philosopher)

Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.

Quentin Crisp (1908-1999, British author)

Sex is a short cut to everything.

Anne Cumming

If it weren't for pickpockets, I'd have no sex life at all.

Rodney Dangerfield (1921-, American comedian, actor)

The act of sex, gratifying as it may be, is God's joke on humanity. It is man's last desperate stand at superintendency.

Bette Davis (1908-1989, American actress, producer)

Women's Liberation calls it enslavement but the real truth about the sexual revolution is that it has made of sex an almost chaotically limitless and therefore unmanageable realm in the life of women.

Midge Decter (1927-, American author, editor, social critic)

Sex. In America an obsession. In other parts of the world a fact.

Marlene Dietrich (1904-1992, German-born American film actor)

You can't remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again.

E. L. Doctorow (1931-, American novelist)

There was a lot of tabloid journalism about my supposed sex addiction. Bullshit. It's all bullshit. I mean, come on, I never pretended to be a saint. But give me a break.

Michael Douglas (1944-, American actor, director, producer)

No woman needs intercourse; few women escape it.

Andrea Dworkin (1946-, American feminist critic)

Sexism is the foundation on which all tyranny is built. Every social form of hierarchy and abuse is modeled on male-over-female domination.

Andrea Dworkin (1946-, American feminist critic)

What will happen to sex after liberation? Frankly, I don't know. It is a great mystery to all of us.

Nora Ephron (1941-, American author, journalist)

We do not understand these Americans who, like adolescents, always speak of sex, and who, like adolescents, all of a sudden have discovered that sex is good not only for procreating children.

Oriana Fallaci

Sex is two plus two making five, rather than four. Sex is the X ingredient that you can't define, and it's that X ingredient between two people that make both a man and a woman good in bed. It's all relative. There are no rules.

Marty Feldman

Older women are best, because they always think they may be doing it for the last time.

Ian Fleming (1908-1964, British writer, "James Bond")

Sexual love is undoubtedly one of the chief things in life, and the union of mental and bodily satisfaction in the enjoyment of love is one of its culminating peaks. Apart from a few queer fanatics, all the world knows this and conducts its life according

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939, Austrian physician, founder of Psychoanalysis)

We must reckon with the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavorable to the realization of complete satisfaction.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939, Austrian physician, founder of Psychoanalysis)

A woman is handicapped by her sex, and handicaps society, either by slavishly copying the pattern of man's advance in the professions, or by refusing to compete with man at all.

Betty Friedan (1921-, American feminist writer)

Instead of fulfilling the promise of infinite orgasmic bliss, sex in the America of the feminine mystique is becoming a strangely joyless national compulsion, if not a contemptuous mockery.

Betty Friedan (1921-, American feminist writer)

I have urged on woman independence of man, not that I do not think the sexes mutually needed by one another, but because in woman this fact has led to an excessive devotion, which has cooled love, degraded marriage and prevented her sex from being what it should be to itself or the other. I wish woman to live, first for God's sake. Then she will not take what is not fit for her from a sense of weakness and poverty. Then if she finds what she needs in man embodied, she will know how to love and be worthy of being loved.

Margaret Witter Fuller (1810-1850, American writer, lecturer)

It is essential that we realize once and for all that man is much more of a sex creature than a moral creature. The former is inherent the other is grafted on.

Emma Goldman (1869-1940, American anarchist)

Of all the sexual aberrations, perhaps the most peculiar is chastity.

Remy De Gourmont (1858-1915, French novelist, philosopher, poet, playwright)

If I were asked for a one line answer to the question "What makes a woman good in bed?" I would say, "A man who is good in bed."

Bob Guccione

The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women.

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-, American author)

Vibrators. I think they are great. They keep you out of stupid sex. I'd pitch them to anybody.

Anne Heche (1969-, American actress)

I find it extraordinary that a straightforward, if inelegant, device for ensuring the survival of the species should involve human beings in such emotional turmoil. Does sex have to be taken so seriously?

P. D. James (1920-, British mystery writer)

Understand that sexuality is as wide as the sea. Understand that your morality is not law. Understand that we are you. Understand that if we decide to have sex whether safe, safer, or unsafe, it is our decision and you have no rights in our lovemaking.

Derek Jarman (1942-, British filmmaker, artist, author)

Back in the days when men were hunters and chest beaters and women spent their whole lives worrying about pregnancy or dying in childbirth, they often had to be taken against their will. Men complained that women were cold, unresponsive, frigid. They wanted their women wanton. They wanted their women wild. Now women were finally learning to be wanton and wild -- and what happened? The men wilted.

Erica Jong (1942-, American author)

I can live without it all -- love with its blood pump, sex with its messy hungers, men with their peacock strutting, their silly sexual baggage, their wet tongues in my ear.

Erica Jong (1942-, American author)

If any of us hopes to survive, s/he must meet the extremity of the American female condition with immediate and political response. The thoroughly destructive and indefensible subjugation of the majority of Americans cannot continue except at the peril of the entire body politic.

June Jordan (1939-, American poet, civil rights activist)

There are very few jobs that actually require a penis or vagina. All other jobs should be open to everybody.

Florynce R. Kennedy

Intercourse with a woman is sometimes a satisfactory substitute for masturbation. But it takes a lot of imagination to make it work.

Karl Kraus (1874-1936, Austrian satirist)

Sexuality poorly repressed unsettles some families; well repressed, it unsettles the whole world.

Karl Kraus (1874-1936, Austrian satirist)

Sexual intercourse began in 1963 (which was rather late for me) -- Between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles first LP.

Philip Larkin (1922-1986, British poet)

I am sure no other civilization, not even the Romans, has showed such a vast proportion of ignominious and degraded nudity, and ugly, squalid dirty sex. Because no other civilization has driven sex into the underworld, and nudity to the W.C.

D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930, British author)

That our popular art forms have become so obsessed with sex has turned the U.S.A into a nation of hobbledehoys; as if grown people don't have more vital concerns, such as taxes, inflation, dirty politics, earning a living, getting an education, or keeping out of jail.

Anita Loos (1893-1981, American novelist, screenwriter)

Everyone probably thinks that I'm a raving nymphomaniac, that I have an insatiable sexual appetite, when the truth is I'd rather read a book.

Madonna (1958-, American musician, singer, actress,)

There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.

Norman Mailer (1923-, American author)

The passion between the sexes has appeared in every age to be so nearly the same, that it may always be considered, in algebraic language as a given quantity.

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834, British economist)

Whoever named it necking is a poor judge of anatomy.

Groucho Marx (1895-1977, American comic actor)

For those for whom the sex act has come to seem mechanical and merely the meeting and manipulation of body parts, there often remains a hunger which can be called metaphysical but which is not recognized as such, and which seeks satisfaction in physical danger, or sometimes in torture, suicide, or murder.

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980, Canadian communications theorist)

Much of the ill-tempered railing against women that has characterized the popular writing of the last two years is a half-hearted attempt to find a way back to a more balanced relationship between our biological selves and the world we have built. So women are scolded both for being mothers and for not being mothers, for wanting to eat their cake and have it too, and for not wanting to eat their cake and have it too.

Margaret Mead (1901-1978, American anthropologist)

Continental people have sex lives; the English have hot-water bottles.

George Mikes

I feel all these jitters when I wake up in the morning, just energy jitters. When I'm having sex, I don't have that.

Alyssa Milano (1972-, American actress)

Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation. The other eight are unimportant.

Henry Miller (1891-1980, American author)

What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.

Henry Miller (1891-1980, American author)

Coitus can scarcely be said to take place in a vacuum; although of itself it appears a biological and physical activity, it is set so deeply within the larger context of human affairs that it serves as a charged microcosm of the variety of attitudes and values to which culture subscribes. Among other things, it may serve as a model of sexual politics on an individual or personal plane.

Kate Millet (1934-, American feminist author)

However muted its present appearance may be, sexual dominion obtains nevertheless as perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power.

Kate Millet (1934-, American feminist author)

After mature deliberation of counsel, the good Queen to establish a rule and immutable example unto all posterity, for the moderation and required modesty in a lawful marriage, ordained the number of six times a day as a lawful, necessary and competent limit.

Michel Eyquem De Montaigne (1533-1592, French philosopher, essayist)

Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society.

Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990, British broadcaster)

We should teach general ethics to both men and women, but sexual relationships themselves must not be policed. Sex, like the city streets, would be risk-free only in totalitarian regimes.

Camille Paglia (1947-, American author, critic, educator)

You have to accept the fact that part of the sizzle of sex comes from the danger of sex. You can be overpowered.

Camille Paglia (1947-, American author, critic, educator)

It's very liberating to be naked in front of a hundred people, but there's nothing sexual about lovemaking on a movie set.

Bill Paxton (1955-, American actor, director, musician, producer, screenwriter)

It's very liberating to be naked in front of a hundred people, but there's nothing sexual about lovemaking on a movie set.

Bill Paxton (1955-, American actor, director, musician, producer, screenwriter)

I know it does make people happy, but to me it is just like having a cup of tea.

Cynthia Payne

There goes a saying, and 'twas shrewdly said, "Old fish at table, but young flesh in bed."

Alexander Pope (1688-1744, British poet, critic, translator)

The backseat produced the sexual revolution.

Jerry Rubin (1938-1994, American activist, author, entrepreneur)

In libertinage, nothing is frightful, because everything libertinage suggests is also a natural inspiration; the most extraordinary, the most bizarre acts, those which most arrantly seem to conflict with every law, every human institution... even those that are not frightful, and there is not one amongst them all that cannot be demonstrated within the boundaries of nature.

Marquis De Sade (1740-1814, French author)

Sex is as important as eating or drinking and we ought to allow the one appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other.

Marquis De Sade (1740-1814, French author)

What does good in bed mean to me? When I'm sick and I stay home from school propped up with lots of pillows watching TV and my mom brings me soup -- that's good in bed.

Brooke Shields (1965-, American actress, model)

Marital intercourse is certainly holy, lawful and praiseworthy in itself and profitable to society, yet in certain circumstances it can prove dangerous, as when through excess the soul is made sick with venial sin, or through the violation and perversion of its primary end, killed by mortal sin; such perversion, detestable in proportion to its departure from the true order, being always mortal sin, for it is never lawful to exclude the primary end of marriage which is the procreation of children.

St. Francis De Sales (1567-1622, Roman Catholic bishop, writer)

Hair is another name for sex.

Vidal Sassoon (1928-, British-born American business executive)

The sexual parts are not only vivid examples of the body's dominion; they are also apertures whose damp emissions and ammoniac smells testify to the mysterious putrefaction of the body.

Roger Scruton

Making love? It's a communion with a woman. The bed is the holy table. There I find passion -- and purification.

Omar Sharif

Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.

Susan Sontag (1933-, American essayist)

Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness -- pushing us at intervals close to taboo and dangerous desires, which range from the impulse to commit sudden arbitrary violence upon another person to the voluptuous yearning for the extinction of one's consciousness, for death itself. Even on the level of simple physical sensation and mood, making love surely resembles having an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone.

Susan Sontag (1933-, American essayist)

No man can call himself liberal, or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his work depends in any way on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women at home, or in the office.

Gloria Steinem (1934-, American feminist writer, editor)

I've always felt that sexuality is a really slippery thing. In this day and age, it tends to get categorized and labeled, and I think labels are for food. Canned food.

Michael Stipe (1960-, American musician, singer, songwriter)

Society's double behavioral standard for women and for men is, in fact, a more effective deterrent than economic discrimination because it is more insidious, less tangible. Economic disadvantages involve ascertainable amounts, but the very nature of societal value judgments makes them harder to define, their effects harder to relate.

Anne Tucker

I know there are nights when I have power, when I could put on something and walk in somewhere, and if there is a man who doesn't look at me, it's because he's gay.

Kathleen Turner (1954-, American actress)

The law of God, as quite plainly expressed in woman's construction, is this: There shall be no limit put upon your intercourse with the other sex sexually, at any time of life. During twenty-three days in every month (in the absence of pregnancy) from the time a woman is seven years old till she dies of old age, she is ready for action, and competent. As competent as the candlestick is to receive the candle. Competent every day, competent every night. Also, she wants that candle -- yearns for it, longs for it, hankers after it, as commanded by the law of God in her heart.

Mark Twain (1835-1910, American humorist, writer)

Sex without love is an empty experience, but as empty experiences go it's one of the best.

Author Unknown

In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse-quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up.

John Updike (1932-, American novelist, critic)

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

John Updike (1932-, American novelist, critic)

What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?

John Updike (1932-, American novelist, critic)

Sex is a conversation carried out by other means. If you get on well out of bed, half the problems of bed are solved.

Peter Ustinov (1921-, British actor, writer, director)

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.

Gore Vidal (1925-, American novelist, critic)

There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses, if not practices.

Gore Vidal (1925-, American novelist, critic)

Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets.

Andy Warhol (1930-, American artist, filmmaker)

All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day.

Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966, British novelist)

There comes a moment in the day when you have written your pages in the morning, attended to your correspondence in the afternoon, and have nothing further to do. Then comes that hour when you are bored; that's the time for sex.

H.G. Wells (1866-1946, British-born American author)

I am, I must confess, suspicious of those who denounce others for having "too much" sex. At what point does a "healthy" amount become "too much"? There are, of course, those who suffer because their desire for sex has become compulsive; in their case the drive (loneliness, guilt) is at fault, not the activity as such. When "morality" is discussed I invariably discover, halfway into the conversation, that what is meant are not the great ethical questions but the rather dreary business of sexual habit, which to my mind is an aesthetic rather than an ethical issue.

Edmund White (1940-, American writer)

I am not a lesbian and I am not a slut, and somehow I am going to make people believe me.

Vanessa Williams (1963-, American singer, actress)

Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the will.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941, British novelist, essayist)

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