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Sex is like snow; you never know how many inches you are going to get or how long it is going to last.
-Anon., [one of "Murphy's Laws on Sex"]
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Sex without love is a meaningless experience, but as far as meaningless experiences go its pretty damn good.
-Woody Allen
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Sex—the great inequality, the great miscalculator, the great Irritator.
-Enid Bagnold, Autobiography, ch. 6 (1969)
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Sex: the thing that takes up the least amount of time and causes the most amount of trouble.
-John Barrymore
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What comes first in a relationship is lust - then more lust.
-Jacqueline Bisset
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"And I wanted to cry out at her that I could not put the body apart from the soul, and that the comfort of her body was more than a thing of the flesh, but was also a comfort of the soul, and why it was I could not say, and why it should be, I could not say, but there was in it nothing that was ugly or evil, but only good. But how can one find such words?"
-Robert McAfee Brown, Pieter in "Too Late the Phalarope"
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I can remember when the air was clean and sex was dirty.
-George Burns
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Sex can be fun after eighty, after ninety, and after lunch!
-George Burns
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The pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable.
-Lord Chesterfield
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What do I know about sex? I'm a married man.
-Tom Clancy
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Sex. In America an obsession. In other parts of the world a fact.
-Marlene Dietrich, “Sex,” Marlene Dietrich’s ABC (1962)
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Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results,
but that's not why we do it.
-Richard Feynman
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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
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Sex in a woman’s world has the same currency a penny has in a man’s. Every penny saved is a penny earned in one world and in the next every sexual adventure is a literary experience.
-Harry Golden, NY Post, January 13, 1964
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If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it’s because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body (and with it your own voice), and that’s the most revolutionary insight of all.
-Erica Jong, “The Artist as Housewife,” The First Ms. Reader, ed. Francine Kragbrun (1972)
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Sex education is legitimate in that girls cannot be taught soon enough how children don’t come into the world.
-Karl Kraus, Trans. by Harry Zohn, originally published in Beim Wort genommen (1955). Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths, University of Chicago Press (1990)
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Learning and sex until rigor mortis.
-Maggie Kuhn
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This is the irrational season
Where love blooms bright and wild.
Had Mary been filled with reason
There'd have been no room for the child.
-Madeleine L'Engle, Weather of the Heart [2001]
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Sex is the one thing you cannot really swindle; and it is the centre of the worst swindling of all, emotional swindling.... Sex lashes out against counterfeit emotion, and is ruthless, devastating against false love.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Sex appeal is fifty percent what you’ve got and fifty percent what people think you’ve got.
-Sophia Loren, Quoted in Halliwell’s Filmgoer’s Companion, Leslie Halliwell (1984)
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A man must be potent and orgasmic to ensure the future of the race.
A woman only needs to be available.
-Masters and Johnson, Masters and Johnson
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I married a German. Every night I dress up as Poland and he invades me.
-Bette Midler
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Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation. The other eight are unimportant.
-Henry Miller, Sexus, ch. 21 (1949)
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A sex symbol becomes a thing.... I just hate to be a thing.
-Marilyn Monroe, As quoted in Ms. magazine, p. 40, August, 1972
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The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.
-Malcolm Muggeridge, Down with Sex, The Most of Malcolm Muggeridge (1966)
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Some people are better imagined in one's bed than found there in the morning.
-P. J. O'Rourke
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Sex is metaphysical for men, as it is not for women. Women have no problem to solve through sex. Physically and psychologically, they are serenely self-contained. They may choose to achieve, but they do not need it. They are not thrust into the beyond by their own fractious bodies. But men are out of balance; they must quest, pursue, court, or seize.... How often one spots a male pigeon making desperate, self-inflating sallies toward the female, as again and again she turns her back on him and nonchalantly marches away. But by concentration and insistence he may carry the day. Nature has blessed him with an obliviousness to his own absurdity.
-Camille Anna Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, ch. 1, Yale University Press (1990)
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As I grow older and older
And totter towards the tomb,
I find I care less and less
Who goes to bed with whom.
-Dorothy L. Sayers, "That's Why I Never Read Modern Novels"
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If sex were all, then every trembling hand
Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.
-Wallace Stevens, “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”
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Of the delights of this world, man cares most for sexual intercourse. He will go to any length for it-risk fortune, character, reputation, life itself.
-Mark Twain
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Of all the various kinds of sexual intercourse, this has the least to recommend it. As an amusement, it is too fleeting; as an occupation, it is too wearing; as a public exhibition, there is no money in it. It is unsuited to the drawing room, and in the most cultured society it has long been banished from the social board. It has at last, in our day of progress and improvement, been degraded to brotherhood with flatulence. Among the best bred, these two arts are now indulged only in private--- though by consent of the whole company, when only males are present, it is still permissible, in good society, to remove the embargo on the fundamental sigh.
-Mark Twain, "Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism", [speech delivered to the Stomach Club, a society of American writers and artists, Paris], 1879
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Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
-John Updike, Piet Hanema, in Couples, ch. 5, 1968
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Lawrence had done it in a way, and Joyce. But I think it's an important thing to do now and then, to describe the sex act as our descent, or adventure, into a primordial or strange world, having very little to do with how we look in suits or what our educations have been. It's a well of darkness, as it were, that leaves you refreshed.
-John Updike, (on the topic of writing about sex)
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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, Interview by Wendy Leigh, Speaking Frankly (1978)
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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, In Homage to Daniel Shays: Collected Essays 1952-1972 (1974). “Norman Mailer’s Self-Advertisements,” Nation (New York, Jan. 2, 1960)
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Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets.
-Andy Warhol
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Love and sex can go together and sex and unlove can go together and love and unsex can go together. But personal love and personal sex is bad.
-Andy Warhol, From A to B and Back Again, ch. 3 (1975)
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Sex contains all, bodies, souls,
Meanings, proofs, purities, delicacies, results, promulgations,
Songs, commands, health, pride, the maternal mystery, the seminal milk,
All hopes, benefactions, bestowals, all the passions, loves, beauties,
delights of the earth.
-Walt Whitman, “A Woman Waits for Me”
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Books about Sex
