“The resulting scrambling to get the next big shiver and shake novel produced some really terrible books. As a further result, the wave had begun to withdraw by the mid 70s, and more traditional bestsellers began to re-appear: stories of sex, big business, sex, spies, gay sex, doctors in trouble, kinky sex, historical romances, sexy celebrities, war stories, and sex.”

“The rest of 2012's big winners are romances, all but one (The Lucky One, by Nicholas Sparks) of the sexed-up genre now known as "mommy-porn.”

“To his way of thinking, the only thing more natural than death was sex.”

“I know people think erotica is just a romance novel with rougher sex. It's not. If it's a subgenre of anything, it's horror.Horror? Really?Romance is sex plus love. Erotica is sex plus fear.”

“Among men, sex sometimes results in intimacy; among women, intimacy sometimes results in sex.”

“Women's lib, Frannie had decided, was nothing more nor less than an outgrowth of the technological society. Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. A man couldn't get with child, but a woman could---every four-year-old knows it. And a pregnant woman is a vulnerable human being. Civilization had provided an umbrella of sanity that both sexes could stand beneath.”

“I read more than I had in years-novels, short stories, three long nonfiction books about how we had stumbled into the Iraq mess (the short answer appeared to have W for a middle initial and a dick for a Vice President).”