Florence King
Florence King
Florence Virginia Kingwas an American novelist, essayist and columnist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth5 January 1936
CountryUnited States of America
reading cutting whales
Updike's style is an exquisite blend of Melville and Austen: reading him is like cutting through whale blubber with embroidery scissors.
hero atheism trying
Randian heroes come off as metaphors for Jews because they are beset by irrational forces that try to bar them from the professions and use their virtues against them to bring about their destruction.
book home cities
Recently while browsing in a secondhand bookstore I bought a paperback copy of The Intellectual and the City, but I was unable to read it. When I got home I discovered that the original owner had highlighted the entire book - literally. Every line on every page had been drawn through with a bright green Magic Marker. It was a terrifying example of a mind that had lost all power of discrimination.
dog new-york yellow
Nothing is more likely to start me screaming like a madwoman than New York in February with its piles of blackened snow full of yellow holes drilled by dogs.
sex loner slim
There is much to be said for post-menopausal celibacy. Sex is rough on loners because you have to have somebody else around, but now I don't. No more diets to stay slim and desirable: I've had sex and I've had food, and I'd rather eat.
nice neurosis way
The nice thing about Southerners is the way we enjoy our neuroses.
order snakes literature
In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order.
feminism spinsterhood
Spinsterhood is Nature's Own Feminism.
jobs book expression
I have a professional acquaintance whose recent eyelid job has left her with a permanent expression of such poleaxed astonishment that she looks at all times as if she had just read one of my books.
couple law literature
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.
home unique government
Owning your own home is America's unique recipe for avoiding revolution and promoting pseudo-equality at the same time. To keep citizens puttering in their yards instead of sputtering on the barricades, the government has gladly deprived itself of billions in tax revenues by letting home owners deduct mortgage interest payments.
southern goes-on mouths
because the theater lost a Barrymore every time a Southerner decided not to go on the stage, just about anything that comes out of a Southern mouth is bound to be a ringing line.
running attitude nice
The confidence and security of a people can be measured by their attitude toward laxatives. At the high noon of the British sun, soldiers in far-flung outposts of the Empire doctored themselves with "a spoonful o' gunpowder in a cuppa 'ot tea." Purveyors and users of harsh laxatives were not afraid of being thought mean and unfriendly just because their laxatives were. But in America, the need to be nice is so consuming that nobody would dare take a laxative that makes you run up the stairs two at a time, pushing others aside and yelling, "Get out of the way!
should-have brooms institutions
The copyeditor I drew was a brachycephalic, web-footed cretin who should have been in an institution learning how to make brooms.