Quotes from Susie Bright

I think that you have to do everything you can do to empower girls when they are young, from their education, to their successful independence, to their sexual self-knowledge.

Behind every erotic condemnation there's a burning hypocrite.

The shocking thing about any stripper gathering, I discovered, was that you have never heard women talk so fast and so explicitly about money in all your life. They make the guys on the trading floor on Wall Street look like a bunch of pansies.

What's so wonderful about experiments is that often they don't work. They do blow up in the oven; the Bride of Frankenstein does crawl out and strangle you with a black leotard while you shout your last prayers. It's only once you've tasted your own shocking failures, harebrained ideas, and sudden departures that you will realize something quite wonderful.

I could not take one more minute of trying to convince the people of Los Angeles that a workers' revolution and a complete overhaul of society was a tiny bit more exciting than getting a bit role in a Burger King commercial

There was one rumor that "Susie Bright" and sex theorist "Pat Califia" were one and the same, and that this individual was not actually a woman at all but a pimp hired by an entity composed of the Mitchell Brothers and a Japanese porn syndicate, which was selling women as sex slaves overseas.

Radical feminists didn't need FBI infiltration — the mechanism for sisterly cannibalization was already well under way.

I wanted to be Emma Goldman. I wanted to digest Doris Lessing's Golden Notebooks like biscuits. I felt like Harriet the Spy, looking for a dumbwaiter to hide in, scribbling down all I witnessed.

Americans had to tie every radical aspiration into a puritanical knot.

I'm as vulnerable as anybody to the toxicity of the American nuclear family. But I wouldn't call it disease or moral failure as much as I would point the finger at a system that grinds people down like a metal file. Who doesn't need a drink? Who isn't going to crack and lash out at the people they love?

When a young woman discovers her power, both sexual and intellectual, she unleashes her own voice, her righteousness. The first things she has to jettison are the Devil and any religious representation of her gender as stained or subservient. She's just naturally going to be attracted to Goddesses or witches or, as in my case, a scientific understanding of the body and a historical view of sexual politics.

Sex is one of the few honest places inside us; it doesn't know how to lie, even if we change the story for the public.

Sexual creativity is a mystery that will never be solved by commercialism.

Let's face it, we can't shop for intelligence, creativity, or freedom.

It didn't occur to me that they would never take my gender and age seriously-- that as long as I was a young woman, they projected their sexual feelings on me, regardless of what I did.

I'm writing a new book right now that is like an erotica manifesto.

There are also just as many, if not more, women who are anxious to hold down the status quo.

I'm like the kid in kindergarten; I really do send valentines to everyone.

Human beings like variety, and they also like partnership... these are scientific values we can point to.

Doing the right thing for someone else was like a tonic for me; it was like some magic ointment that made a wound disappear.

Finding people who get enormous pleasure from reading books is a more and more unusual experience, and so writers just so much want to be heard.