Janet Fitch Quotes

Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.

Chick-lit may be staggering on its heels, but women's fiction is alive and kicking.

When sex is necessary for the plot of a book, or a character development, then I don't shy away from it. Why should I?

Chick lit was amazing, and I was thrilled to be part of it.

I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.

Sometimes the books most restrained about sex, even deeply scandalized by it, can whisper to us with the greatest hidden force. I am a huge admirer of the recently deceased, always underranked Evan S. Connell.

Most people like a little sex in their novels.

I say, 'I write romance, women's fiction, chick lit.' I think it all fits very comfortably under the same umbrella. Basically, I write books for women - books about relationships: books that make you laugh and sometimes make you cry a little.

I love 19th century fiction and, in particular, fiction written by and about women.

I feel sex is a common topic everyone see in content of any television shows be it a fiction or live comedy or a chat show.

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.

If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.

Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.

The two worst sins of bad taste in fiction are pornography and sentimentality. One is too much sex and the other too much sentiment.

Sex, without society as its landscape, has never been of much interest to fiction.

I think it's common sense to shy away from the erotic. Perhaps this grand experiment, which started with Lady Chatterley's Lover, of seeing what you can write and how you can write about sex, has reached a certain weary terminus with Fifty Shades of Grey.

Very, very often in movie sex you see this fiction about unity. A union. That somehow these two thinking beings become one, and there's one action and they're sort of perfectly in sync, and the lighting's perfect, and they've got their eyes closed, and they're gone, you know? And then you cut to someone having a cigarette. And it's all so much Novocain. Meanwhile, those of us us watching it are going "I'm never going to tell anybody, but I never have sex like that".

in the press, my sex life was something else again. I was Lady Bountiful of the Sheets. Some of the best fiction of the Sixties was written about my amorous adventures with an assortment of lovers who could have only been chosen by a berserk random sampler.

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties - all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion - these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.

I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.

I read "The Group" by Mary McCarthy. It had tons of sex in it, or so I thought at the time.

You’re far more likely to see a naked woman than a naked man. It’s only [seen as] rude because the rest of television is rather tame – it doesn’t actually talk about sex and our bodies and how we feel about them. I’m not out to shock.

Sex almost always disappoints me in novels. Everything can be said or done now, and that's what I often find: everything, a feeling of generality or dispersal. But in my experience, true sex is so particular, so peculiar to the person who yearns for it. Only he or she, and no one else, would desire so very much that very person under those circumstances. In fiction, I miss that sense of terrific specificity.

I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.

I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.