“For years I had my hair parted down the middle in a ponytail, tucked down around the sides Well, I went and cut the bangs, and I’ve been wearing them ever since. They say it’s my trademark.”

Young women say I helped them come out of their shells.

I was never one who was squeamish about nudity. I don’t believe in being promiscuous about it, but several times I thought of going to a nudist colony.

After all, he put Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden naked as jaybirds!

It makes me feel wonderful that people still care for me… that I have so many fans among young people, who write to me and tell me I have been an inspiration.

I never kept up with the fashions. I believed in wearing what I thought looked good on me.

Sex is a part of love. You shouldn’t go around doing it unless you are in love.

I like being outdoors. I like to go cavorting in the nude in the forests. It is just another world. To take sunbaths in the nude.

I was never the girl next door.

The only person I did bondage for was Irving Klaw and his sister Paula. Usually they would shoot four or five models every Saturday. He wouldn’t pay for the regular pictures unless we did some bondage. So I did bondage shots to get paid for the other photos.

Being in the nude isn’t a disgrace unless you’re being promiscuous about it. After all, when God created Adam and Eve, they were stark naked. And in the Garden of Eden, God was probably naked as a jaybird too!

I have always had strong maternal instincts.

I was nineteen and I put a bowl on and I said, Cut around! Because it was not the fashion at the time when I did that hairdo – and I kept it all my life!

There is something fearfully strengthening about cutting free even if the ties bandage the heart itself.

In [family snapshots] the flow of profane time has been stopped and a sacred interval of self-conscious revelation has been cut from it by the edge of the picture frame and the light of the sun or the flash.

A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.

Each of us is carving a stone, erecting a column, or cutting a piece of stained glass in the construction of something much bigger than ourselves.

Energy has to be fed from a source. If you don’t feed the source, it dissipates entirely.

I’ve never really felt that I’ve had the right hair cut, or had the right clothes.