sex
I know older men in comedy who can barely feed and clean themselves, and they still work. The women, though, they’re all “crazy.” I have a suspicion—and hear me out, because this is a rough one—that the definition of “crazy” in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore.
Tina Fey, “Confessions of a Juggler,” The New Yorker, February 14 & 21, 2011, pp 64–67 (quote is on page 65).
“Before marriage I was wildly interested in sex, but since joining up with my old goat, it has taken its proper position in my life.”
October 28, 1953 letter to Avis DeVoto in As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), 142.
Birth, and copulation, and death.
That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks:
Birth, and copulation, and death.
I’ve been born, and once is enough.
“Fragment of the Agon,” Sweeney Agonistes in The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1952), 80–81.
I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.
A Man Without a Country (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 17.
Abstractly cheering thought: the millions of people around the world who will tonight sleep together for the first time.
Twitter, 2:22 PM Jan 27, 2010.