Erotica Quotes

Pornography is about dominance. Erotica is about mutuality. (Gloria Steinem)

Erotica is using a feather, pornography is using the whole chicken.

Isabel Allende

What is classical music if not the epitome of sensuality, passion, and understated erotica that popular music, even with all of its energy and life, cannot even begin to touch?

Lara St. John

[I]n the male sexual lexicon, which is the vocabulary of power, erotica is simply high-class pornography: better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer. As with the call girl and the streetwalker, one is turned out better but both are produced by the same system of sexual values and both perform the same sexual service.

Andrea Dworkin

Erotica is as different from pornography as love is from rape, as dignity is from humiliation, as partnership is from slavery, as pleasure is from pain.

Gloria Steinem

I don't know what the definition of pornography is and nobody else does either. Pornography is somebody else's erotica that you don't like. People are interested in their own sexuality and they've always reflected it in their art. End of story.

Erica Jong

Erotica: the depiction of naked men. Depictions of naked women are far less innocent and are known as "pornography."

Richard Summerbell

The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting.

Gloria Leonard

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

Susie Bright

Erotica is simply high-class pornography; better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer.

Andrea Dworkin

In practice, attempts to sort out good erotica from bad porn inevitably comes down to "What turns me on is erotic; what turns you on is pornographic." (Ellen Willis)

I didn't skip the smut. The author went to the trouble of writing it, after all. I did not feel to make notes for possible application later on but I also never wondered if the author was a virgin raised in an abandoned hentai warehouse, which is always a possibility for modern pornographers and erotica writers.

James Nicoll