Quotes from 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.

He travels fastest who travels alone, and that goes double for she. Real feminism is spinsterhood.

Whenever people are confronted by a prediction for the future that they simply cannot or will not believe, they always say, 'It will never happen in my lifetime.' If the prediction is something they deplore and fear, they say it with calculated bravado, often adding a smug, snorty hhrrummph.

True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.

For men who want to flee Family Man America and never come back, there is a guaranteed solution: homosexuality is the new French Foreign Legion.

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.'

Democracy elevates by turning ordinary people into extraordinary ordinary people called celebrities.

Some last words seem flat-out unbelievable.

Christopher Hitchens and I were not friends or even acquaintances. We never met or spoke on the phone, just exchanged occasional brief letters - notes, really - hand-written and snail-mailed at first, e-mailed later.

During the feminist seventies men were caught between a rock and a hard-on; in the fathering eighties they are caught between good hugs and bad hugs.

The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between taking lovers and taking no prisoners.

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.

Real feminism is spinsterhood. It's time America admitted that old maids give all women a good name.

They don't call him 'No Drama Obama' for nothing. He's even worse than we thought because he has committed the ultimate American crime, worse than anything he has been accused of so far: He has no sense of humor.

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

Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.

We are incapable of leaving anything to the imagination and loath to leave anything out. Maniacal thoroughness has become our national verbal ideal.

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.

A man should never apologize!

Writers, not psychiatrists, are the true interpreters of the human mind and heart, and we have been at it for a very long time.

Showing up at school already able to read is like showing up at the undertaker's already embalmed: people start worrying about being put out of their jobs.