Absence Quote by Mary McCarthy

“Our great novelists, though experts on indignity and assault, on loneliness and terror, tend to avoid treating the passionate encounter of a man and…

— Leslie Fiedler

[Preface to second edition:] ... I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the…

— Anne Bronte

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

— Elizabeth Hardwick

Literature is all, or mostly, about sex.

— Anthony Burgess

“It is the sex of the novels and not that of their authors that must interest us. All great novels, all true novels are…

— Milan Kundera

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…

— Anatole Broyard

I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.

— Anonymous

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

— Gertrude Stein

“You're the absolute protagonist of this book, very well; but do you believe that gives you the right to have carnal relations with all…

— Italo Calvino

“As more and more norms disappear from social praxis, literature faces ever-growing difficulties. Its predicament is beginning to resemble that of a child who…

— Stanisław Lem

Most people like a little sex in their novels.

— John Sandford

“Sexual revelation in literature, must be tactful and must serve plot”

— Gore Vidal