Memoirists From The United States

"I’m tall, I have real boobs, I’m Asian and I have dark hair."

"I look for a man who is very confident. I like intelligent and am drawn to men with a strong science background. I think the only conventionally handsome guy I have ever been attracted to was Steve McQueen, but that was just his tough guy thing. I love European guys and I LOVE Firemen! I love a guy who can do crazy things with me and laugh, and did I mention that I love Firemen."

"I’ve noticed that the majority of my fans respect me as a woman. I’m the girl who came along that a lot of women were waiting for. They don’t have to be intimidated by me. They can relate to me because I’m not just some bimbo. I’m not implying that the majority of the women in the business are, I just think they see in me a woman who treats the business like a business yet can act slutty. A lot of the girls don’t respect their fans. I’ve had so many people say thank you for taking the extra time to talk to me. This is why I got into entertainment. I thrive on being in front of the camera and I love to give something to people. I have couples come up and say ‘we’re like you, we’re educated and have jobs, but we are into wild kinky sex.’ A lot of men will show my movies to their girlfriends because they think their girlfriends are going to like me because I’m not intimidating. I’m proud to be setting a good standard for this business."

"Some guys think I'm a racist because I never did a scene with a black or Asian guy ... I just laugh."

"I had always wanted to be in an adult movie. It turned me on to think I would be having sex and a lot of men would be watching me."

"I was always very outgoing. I have always loved to be in front of the camera, very talkative, very extraverted, like I am now. My little brother is seven and he is exactly the same. People always told me I should be an actress. I still love working in front of the camera, I love taking photographs and I prefer modeling to acting. Acting is something you have to learn over years. I have a background in fashion and still love doing fashion photography. I also love doing nudes. They are an extension of fashion to me. You can see in my pictures that I love to work the camera. That shows in your face."

"I have worked without them in the past, but I do advocate condom use....I think it’s a matter of personal choice. The industry has set some high standards as far as the testing. Beyond that, it’s up to the performers to keep themselves healthy. I tell the girls who I talk to, if you’re going to protect yourself with a guy on a one night stand, why not protect yourself with a guy you’re going to work with who you’ve known for five minutes?"

"I’m not saying I don’t like women, I just don’t like having hard-core sex with them. I’ve done lots of soft-core stuff with women and I’m fine. But no, you won’t see Janine strapping it on and doing me."

"I was really interested in being a model when I was a little girl. I loved all the pictures of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. I loved watching old movies -- I was really into Bettie Page, she was a big role model to me. I've always looked up to models like Elaine Irwin and Stephanie Seymour. I've always loved modeling."

"It's really funny because we have this rule that the day before we shoot a movie, we don't have sex at all. You've got to be prepared and you have to have all your energy. But when we come home, we are usually pretty chill. We relax a little bit, we eat, he catches up on e-mail, I catch up on Law & Order, and then we hop into bed together. Then he is all over me again, he's like 'C'mon, let's do it' and I'm like 'Okay.' Especially after a girl-on-girl scene, he really gets riled up!"

"When I run into couples who recognize me, it’s usually the women who are the most friendly. Once, at a Greek restaurant in New York City, a huge family was seated at a table nearby. Late in the evening, the grandmother stood up and said, ‘Tera, I love you! I watch you all night long!’ Her daughter almost had a heart attack out of embarrassment. The grandma replied, ‘Honey, I may be old, but I’m not dead yet!’"

"I mean we live in a society full of double standards and hypocritical paradox. I don't understand why the ultra conservatives in America have a problem with a porn star being portrayed in a videogame. I mean, there is no nudity, and the game will be rated accordingly. I mean kids play games where senseless killing is ok (like Grand Theft Auto, or even BYW2), and no one questions people jumping off the roof and slamming someone's face into an abandoned car, or shooting little old ladies! No one ever need kill anyone in real life, yet sex is something that everyone, except maybe Dick Cheney, will experience as a positive thing in their lifetime! People need to relax! I want to design and star in a real adult videogame! Let people get their sexual frustrations out!"

"I treat the business like a business because I have a business mind. I really enjoy my work and my scenes and I think that's part of the reason why I haven't gotten burned out. I've been able to pick and choose to a great extent and that helps. Since I do have a nursing career to fall back on, I am not really forced to be in the business. I stay because I truly enjoy the work."

"That’s really hard. I am who I am. I don’t really change on camera and I think that’s what a lot of my fans respect about me. I don’t see anything wrong with a beautiful, intelligent girl being sexual and nasty. I can do a rough hard-core sex scene, then do a lecture on DNA. That’s just who I am."

"One of my favorite sex scenes was with TT Boy. He throws me up on a stairwell and rapes me. I had two orgasms which was pretty intense. Plus we were outside in the heat so that kind of added more to it, and there were people watching. That really was a turn on."

"Some girlfriends of mine wanted to pose for Playboy and they asked me to send my pictures in too. I didn't think anything of it -- I was just like, 'Sure, whatever.' I didn't think they would call me back the next day. They were like, 'You have an exotic look and we are interested in shooting you.' I can't explain it but it must have been in the cards or something. I never did pursue anything mainstream. I went and posed for Playboy, then a week later I ended up meeting Suze Randall who shot me for Penthouse and Hustler -- it was just a whirlwind from there. I ended up only being published in Playboy in a foreign edition because it came out in Penthouse at the same time. I think that had I only been published in Playboy, I might have gone down another road."

"Redemption, he says: that's what this book and all the others are really about. His favourite interview was with CP Ellis, a former Ku Klux Klan leader who ended up fighting for the union rights of black janitors alongside his partner, an African-American woman. "Anybody can be redeemed. I've seen it.""

"I'm not joking when I refer to our country as the United States of Amnesia, although I was corrected recently by Studs Terkel out of Chicago. And he said, “Gore, it's not the United States of Amnesia; it's the United States of Alzheimer's.”"

"You know, "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely"? It's the same with powerlessness. Absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely. Einstein said everything had changed since the atom was split, except the way we think. We have to think anew."

"I like quoting Einstein. Know why? Because nobody dares contradict you."

"A man comes from New York. He says, "These petitions, your name is on all of them: anti-poll tax, anti-lynching, friendship with the Soviet Union.... don't you know the communists were behind them?" And he said, "Look, you can get out of this pretty easy. All you got to do is say the communists duped you. You were dumb. You didn't mean it." I said, "But I did mean it!" To this day people say, "Oh, Studs, you were so heroic." Heroic? I was scared shitless! But my ego was at stake. My vanity. "Whaddya mean, I'm dumb?""

"The key issue is jobs. You can't get away from it: jobs. Having a buck or two in your pocket and feeling like somebody. Mother Jones Magazine - Sep 1995"

"I was walking downstairs carrying a drink in one hand and a book in the other. Don't try that after ninety."

"I'm celebrated for celebrating the uncelebrated."

"Think of what's stored in an 80- or a 90-year-old mind. Just marvel at it. You've got to get out this information, this knowledge, because you've got something to pass on. There'll be nobody like you ever again. Make the most of every molecule you've got as long as you've got a second to go. That's your charge."

"For the first book, I interviewed one mother of four little kids, skinny, pretty, bad teeth — meaning no dental care — and the kids are jumping around, 'cause they want to hear their mamma's voice played back... and so I play it back, and she listens to what she said on the tape and she says, 'Oh my God,' she says. ' I never knew I felt that way before' … That's pretty hot stuff, isn't it? That's hot stuff. That's the stuff."

"Doris Lessing: We simply have no idea of Chicago … We never think of you as being on a lake, or of the city being beautiful. We think about the gangsters. You do still have gangsters, don't you? Terkel: Yes, but these days they're mostly in business, or politics."

"At a time when pimpery, lick-spittlery, and picking the public's pocket are the order of the day — indeed, officially proclaimed as virtue — the poet must play the madcap to keep his balance. And ours."

"Something was still there, that something that distinguishes an artist from a performer: the revealing of self. Here I be. Not for long, but here I be. In sensing her mortality, we sensed our own."

"Chicago is not the most corrupt American city, it's the most theatrically corrupt."

"I was born in the year the Titanic sank. The Titanic went down, and I came up. That tells you a little about the fairness of life."

"Terkel has built a career on the hunch that pretty much everyone might be worth trying to talk to: the rich and famous, certainly, and burglars and murderers and Ku Klux Klansmen — but most of all the teeming, unexamined mass of American life in between. Armed with a tape recorder, he has interviewed hundreds of people, producing a series of books that tell the story of the American century verbatim, and from the ground up: day-labourers, poor farmers and gangsters for Hard Times, his book about the Depression; everyone from steelworkers to hookers for Working, about the realities of employment in America; and his Pulitzer Prize-winning chronicle of the second world war, The Good War. They are the sound of a nation spontaneously unburdening itself to the first person who had thought to ask."

"The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall; nations perish; civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again, and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men’s hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead. And even the books that do not last long, penetrate their own times at least, sailing farther than Ulysses even dreamed of, like ships on the seas. It is the author’s part to call into being their cargoes and passengers,—living thoughts and rich bales of study and jeweled ideas. And as for the publishers, it is they who build the fleet, plan the voyage, and sail on, facing wreck, till they find every possible harbor that will value their burden."

"We must make the best of those ills which cannot be avoided."

"The rich are not really a bad lot. We must not judge by appearances. If it weren't for their money they would be indistinguishable from the rest of us. But money brings out their weaknesses, naturally. Would it not bring out ours? A moderate addiction to money may not always be hurtful; but when taken in excess it is nearly always bad for the health, it limits one's chance of indulging in nice simple pleasures, and in many cases it lowers the whole moral tone. The rich admit this — of each other; but what can they do? Once a man has begun to accumulate money, it is unnatural to stop. He actually gets in a state where he wants more and more. This may seem incomprehensible to those who have never suffered from affluence, and yet they would feel the same way, in a millionaire's place. A man begins by thinking that he can have money without being its victim. He will admit that other men addicted to wealth find it hard to be moderate, but he always is convinced that he is different and has more self-control. But the growth of an appetite is determined by nature, not men, and this is as true of getting money as of anything else. As soon as a man is used to a certain amount, no matter how large, his ideas of what is suitable expand. That is the way men are made."

"When eras die, their legacies Are left to strange police. Professors in New England guard The glory that was Greece."

"You can't sweep other people off their feet, if you can't be swept off your own."

"Information's pretty thin stuff unless mixed with experience."

"Being broke is against my religion."

"Get rich or die tryin'."

"That watch is nice! That's what you bought for me?"

"In 2002, if you asked me to make a wish? I simply would've wished that my music would be a hit."

"Fronting on me will shorten your life-span."

"People want the truth. Even if they can't handle it, they want it. They may want to look at it as a story or music so they can distance themselves from it, but they want it. That's why people watch the news every night. There's nothing good on the news. They'll throw in a little "good news" near the end, like something about a cat being saved from a tree. But before you hear about that cat, you're going to learn that someone got shot and killed, an earthquake killed a couple of hundred people, and that whatever war is going on at the time is still going on and going hard. And you still watch. Why? Because you want the truth. You'll complain, but you'll watch. Every night. The news always gets good ratings."

"I need you to pray for me; I need you to care for me. I need you to want me to win. I need to know where I'm heading, because I know where I've been."

"I've got to make it to heaven; for going through hell."

"Look baby, this is simple. You can't see? You're fucking with me? You're fucking with a P.I.M.P.!"

"Have a baby by me, baby, be a millionaire."

"I am what I am; you can like it or love it. It feels good to blow fifty grand and think nothing of it."

"Sometimes, I sit back and look at life from a different angle. Don't know if I'm God's child, or I'm Satan's angel."