By Sarah Preston

Candace Bushnell never set out to be a journalist. In 1994, when she started writing her column Sex and the City for the New York Observer, it was simply a natural step on her road to becoming the world's most recognized, not to mention most fashionable, female novelist -- something she had fantasized about since childhood. But as anyone with a television can tell you, the column became the book, which became a TV phenomenon with a cult following and an all-star cast led by Sarah Jessica Parker who played Bushnell's alter-ego Carrie Bradshaw. Even Playboy founder Hugh Hefner has given his stamp of approval. "Sex and the City is one of my all-time favorite television shows. I have all the DVDs, and we're now revisiting them all. I'm a very big fan of Candace's," he told Playboy.com, after meeting Bushnell while taping a segment on The View.

Not only did the column, the book and the show provide a snapshot of our social and sexual zeitgeist, they also fueled conversations about sex with women of all ages, and the men who date them, becoming an important piece of popular culture that also helped spawn the whole "chick lit" genre.

But Bushnell only became a journalist to pay the bills and to be taken seriously. Not content to rest on her Manolo Blahniks, throughout six seasons of Sex and the City (Bushnell had creative input on the first two) she churned out two more best-sellers -- Four Blondes and Trading Up -- which received critical acclaim for their ability to create universes parallel to the fabulous one she was living in in New York City.

Bushnell and the characters she has created resemble people we know or want to be like, whether it's the slick, powerful "Mr. Big" of Sex and the City or the self-sufficient, 40-something women protagonists in her recently published new novel Lipstick Jungle. However, she disagrees with the notion that the characters in her latest book are thinly veiled versions of people she actually knows. "People feel they identify with the characters; they feel like these characters are like me or they're like my friends, but they're not based on real people. It's fiction," she explains.

Bushnell, 46 and married since 2002, has a svelte bod most 30-year-olds would die for, but she's surprisingly down to earth for one of the queens of the New York City social scene. When Playboy.com spoke with her -- her raspy voice conjuring images of her former hard-partying days covering Studio 54 -- she weighed in on a number of her favorite topics: men, status, money, power and, ironically, the pitfalls of casual sex.