Florence King

“Until the mid-seventies, the traditional or classic lesbian was always a spinster and often a tweedy intellectual, with a stark glamour that titillated men and women alike. This is the woman that feminists destroyed when they pressured the media for 'positive images' of lesbians.”

“Gradually my whole concept of time changed until I thought of a month as having twenty-five days of humanness and five others when I might just as well have been an animal in a steel trap.”

“If last words are to be audible and coherent, they need to be delivered before you have any tubes up your nose or down your throat. Otherwise, the nurse gets the last word when she says, 'Don't try to talk, honey.'”

“In the South, Sunday morning sex is accompanied by church bells.”

“American couples have gone to such lengths to avoid the interference of in-laws that they have to pay marriage counselors to interfere between them.”

“To achieve the very pinnacle of good taste, the neoclassicists wrote their plays entirely in alexandrine verse, a rarefied meter that is uniquely tailored to the French language and fits no other.”

“If the West Point class of 1915 is called 'the class the stars fell on' for the number of World War II generals it produced, my junior-high class of 1950 is the class a ton of bricks fell on from Hollywood's gut-wrenching portrayals of mother-love in '40s-era movies.”

“Until feminists started wailing about the female's passivity, submissiveness, and something called 'victim status,' I had no idea women were such doormats. My childhood was populated by Eleanor Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, Pearl Buck, Marie Curie, Clare Boothe Luce, and the Duchess of Windsor.”

“Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty - as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.”

“People are so busy dreaming the American Dream, fantasizing about what they could be or have a right to be, that they're all asleep at the switch. Consequently we are living in the Age of Human Error.”

“Now the only thing I miss about sex is the cigarette afterward. Next to the first one in the morning, it's the best one of all. It tasted so good that even if I had been frigid I would have pretended otherwise just to be able to smoke it.”

“Children have no business expressing opinions on anything except "Do you have enough room in the toes?”

“Women's writing was coming along fine until feminists came along and turned it into Women's Lit.”

“Aging does not make women powerless objects of pity but colorful and entertaining individuals and, on occasion, fire-breathing dragons that wise people don't cross.”

“In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order.”

“In 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,' I couldn't take my eyes off Judith Anderson as Big Mama.”

“A woman must wait for her ovaries to die before she can get her rightful personality back. Post-menstrual is the same as pre-menstrual; I am once again what I was before the age of twelve: a female human being who knows that a month has thirty day, not twenty-five, and who can spend every one of them free of the shackles of that defect of body and mind known as femininity.”

“Optimists don't mind if you eavesdrop on them. They welcome it, in fact, because it helps them spread their fiendish gospel.”

“The long march of Western civilization from pantheons of gods for every taste to one God for all has been thrown into reverse by celebrity worship to give us a plethora of ancient deities to follow.”

“I'd rather rot on my own floor than be found by a bunch of bingo players in a nursing home.”