Writing And Sex Quotes & Sayings

Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites. Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems were for alcoholics, and Mores were for people who considered themselves to be outrageous but really weren't. — David Sedaris

Even if, at the moment, you can't sit down and do the gruntwork of stringing verbs and nouns together, you are writing. It is a way of seeing, a way of being. The world is not only the world, but your personal filing cabinet. You lodge details of the world in your sparkling nerve-library that spirals through your brain and coils down your arms and legs, collects in your belly and your sex. You write, even if you can't always "write."
However, writers write. Active, not passive. — Luis Alberto Urrea

Good writing like good sex requires discipline. — Chloe Thurlow

Why fantasize about what you already experience? I go to the written word for places and faces that I don't get at home. Hot people in hot climates. Sex acts I can hardly imagine. Porn is about the unachievable ... and, therefore, the inherently desirable. — Belle De Jour

Marjan. I have told him tales of good women and bad women, strong women and weak women, shy women and bold women, clever women and stupid women, honest women and women who betray. I'm hoping that, by living inside their skins while he hears their stories, he'll understand over time that women are not all this way or that way. I'm hoping he'll look at women as he does at men
that you must judge each of us on her own merits, and not condemn us or exalt us only because we belong to a particular sex. — Susan Fletcher

All who have brought about a state of sex-consciousness are to blame, and it is they who drive me, when I want to stretch my faculties on a book, to seek it in that happy age ... when the writer used both sides of his mind [the male and female sides of his mind] equally. One must turn back to Shakespeare then, for Shakespeare was androgynous; and so were Keats and Sterne and Cowper and Lamb and Coleridge. Shelley perhaps was sexless. Milton and Ben Jonson had a dash too much of the male in them. So had Wordsworth and Tolstoy. — Virginia Woolf

I write about how I was attracted to stripping because I didn't feel comfortable with my body, for instance, but there could be plenty of not-so-good reasons why I chose to go into journalism, too. Maybe someone had a trauma in childhood and it led them to become a nurse, or a lawyer, but because people stigmatize sex work they try to find a traumatic moment in your past and say, "There!" — Craig Seymour

The 'swapping' is interesting. This practice one had thought confined to certain earnest Americans in the smaller, more tedious cities, to those wives and husbands who had read sex manuals and radically wanted more of life even if it had to be, like pizza, brought in from around the corner
all of this was accomplished by Bloomsbury in the lightest, most spontaneous and good-natured manner. — Elizabeth Hardwick

Ooh!" Willy pipes up. "Maybe he'll write a story about Santa and Mrs. Claus getting caught with their pants down with other people. If we get lucky, maybe he'll kill-"

"Don't finish that sentence, elf."

"Randy, you're such a spoilsport. You can't say you haven't conjured up that scenario in your big head a time or a dozen. Continue. Maybe I'll write that story."

"No, you won't. Your idea of a good story is nothing but sex, sex, and more sex. You'd never make it through writing a chapter because you'd have to stop and jerk off a half dozen times."

"Ew! Not about Santa and Mrs. Claus. Yuck," Willy comes back at him with a sour look on his face. "That's not even funny, Randy. — Candi Kay

Sex is hard to write about because you lose the universal and succumb to the particular. We all have our different favorites. Good sex is impossible to write about. Lawrence and Updike have given it their all, and the result is still uneasy and unsure. It may be that good sex is something fiction just can't do
like dreams. Most of the sex in my novels is absolutely disastrous. Sex can be funny, but not very sexy. — Martin Amis

Name?" the desk clerk said to me politely, her pencil poised.
"Name," I said vaguely. I remembered, and told her.
"Age?" she asked. "Sex? Occupation?"
"Writer," I said.
"Housewife," she said.
"Writer," I said.
"I'll just put down housewife," she said. — Shirley Jackson

It's amazing to me that people have any interest in such a low-level sex scandal. If I were sleeping with a congressman, maybe, but I'm a nobody and the people I'm writing about are nobodies. — Jessica Cutler

So here we are, a pack of Homo sapiens thinking that we know whether a person is female or male. Now that I've spent a few years researching and talking with people who fall under the transgender umbrella, I am confident saying that male/ female is not the only way to describe gender. The people I've come to know and love in the course of writing and photographing this book have helped me better understand the fluidity of gender and sex.

This lesson for me also reinforces what I've been writing about for years: once we get to know individuals who may be different from ourselves, it is less likely we will be wary of them. And maybe, just maybe, we will learn a little more about ourselves. — Susan Kuklin

Both sex and death are eternal themes. You could make thousands of movies on this theme, and whether you have a human being who is painting, singing, making a film, writing, these are the themes that you will come back to and return to. If you don't have any of these artistic expressions, sex is one of the only gifts that nature gave you for free, so it is very important to celebrate it. And then, with death, we are condemned to that. This is absolutely present in our lives. — Pedro Almodovar

I'm a very dull passenger. I don't speak. I don't have sex. No alcohol. I don't do drugs. The thing that I like about flying is that I feel like I can really concentrate. I used to write many things, and many ideas for my movies belong to this moment where I'm not anywhere specifically in terms of time and space and geography. I am suspended, and this suspension fits me very well. — Pedro Almodovar

[Satan] has hundreds of agents writing pornographic literature and producing sex movies to pollute [the mind]. He has intellectuals in high positions teaching a hedonistic and permissive philosophy ... They lack an anchor for their real self. — Billy Graham

Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this: You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of "I's," and a listening audience somehow turns each "I" into a "me." This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature. — Adam Gopnik

I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man. — Anne Bronte

I don't write about sex because it's not really my subject. I love it when other people write about it, but it's not my subject, and I don't want anyone I've had sex with to write about it. Plus, you're in front of an audience, and they picture wherever you're writing about. I'm 52; no one in the audience wants to picture that. — David Sedaris

People frequently comment on the emptiness in one night stands, but emptiness here has always been just another word for darkness. Blind encounters writing sonnets no one can ever read. Desire and pain communicated in the vague language of sex.
None of which made sense to me until much later when I realized everything I thought I'd retained of my encounters added up to so very little, hardly enduring, just shadows of love outlining nothing at all. — Mark Z. Danielewski

When I finish writing a rap verse. It's a lot like sex: You start off slow with ideas, like foreplay, and then you put your all into it. When you end it with the perfect thought, it's like that perfect last stroke. — Drake

Writing about sex is not as personally revealing as one might think, because like anything else you write about, the words are not the deed. I have not done those words, I have done and felt private things for which words such as "sex" and "lust" are only poor apologies. — Doreen Baingana

I don't think I would ever write a book with what anybody could call pornography in it, because I feel that pornography is a cheat. It is an attempt to provide sexual experience by secondhand means. Now sex is a thing which has to be experienced firsthand, if you are really going to understand it, and pornography is rather like trying to find out about a Beethoven symphony by having somebody tell you about it and perhaps hum a few bars. It's not the same thing. Sex is primarily a question of relationships. Pornography is a do-it-yourself kit
a twenty-second best. — Robertson Davies

It galls me that seeking out the seedy, the sordid, the sexual, and the deviant is the expected (if not altogether acceptable) behavior of male writers; it would surely benefit me, as a writer, if I had the courage to seek out more of the seedy, the sordid, the sexual, and the deviant myself. But women who seek out such things are made to feel ashamed, or else they sound stridently ridiculous in defending themselves
as if they're bragging ... Yet there are subjects that remain off-limits for women writers. It's not unlike that dichotomy which exists regarding one's sexual past: it is permissible, even attractive, for a man to have had one, but if a woman has had a sexual past, she'd better keep quiet about it. — John Irving

To some extent, emotions are universal and can be treated that way; no matter what the participants' orientation or preference, they have sex for the same reasons and can experience the same array of emotions in the process. But there are three important distinctions to be made: 1. The logistics of physiology 2. The basics of sexual attraction 3. Cultural impact on character and situation — Diana Gabaldon

The moment you know that this is the person with whom you want to spend the rest of your life, you should start the engagement process. Once you know this, the nature of the relationship changes. You view actions differently, the pressure to have sex increases, and your relationship with others is affected. If you're considering getting engaged, write out the sentence Staying married is hard work fifty times ... Though I say this with some humor, I think these points bear repeating: Don't underestimate the work involved, but don't panic either. — Kay Coles James

One of the general patterns of good (i.e., striking and memorable) writing is the effect of repetition. If you use a certain element - a plot device, an image, a noticeable phrase - once, readers may or may not notice it consciously, but it doesn't disturb the flow of their reading. If you use that element twice, they won't notice it consciously - but they will notice it subconsciously, and it will add to the resonance of the writing or to their sense of depth and involvement (and if it's a plot device, it will heighten the dramatic tension). But if you use that element three times, everybody will notice it the third time you do it. — Diana Gabaldon

This is why you use imagery when writing about sex; it's a means both of evoking immediacy and of distilling emotion. — Diana Gabaldon

I have seldom met an individual of literary tastes or propensities in whom the writing of love was not directly attributable to the love of writing.
A person of this sort falls terribly in love, but in the end it turns out that he is more bemused by a sheet of white paper than a sheet of white bed linen. He would rather leap into print with his lady than leap into bed with her. (This first pleases the lady and then annoys her. She wants him to do both, and with virtually the same impulse.) — E.B. White

Men have external genitalia, while women have internal genitalia. This simple difference makes a lot of difference in how they write about themselves - and how you might write about your characters. Male writers don't often address internal sensation in a character, because they don't experience it (and probably often don't realize consciously that it's there). This accounts for a lot of Really Terrible sex scenes written by men (if you look at the "Bad Sex-Scene Awards" in any given year, you'll see that the vast majority are done by male writers). — Diana Gabaldon

There's one thing I've been striving for all my life: with sex, with writing, with surfing, with partying, with anything and everything. And that is to be free. It's the one feeling I never had growing up. When I open my eyes, I feel free like I never have before. I see the guys sitting against the wall, their cheeks shining with tears, and I can tell they've been on this ride with me. Then I see Lorraine, beaming at me like an angel. And I tell her, "You're doing God's work." The words come out of my mouth before I have a chance to think about them. I've never used the word God in my life in a spiritual context. In fact, the week before, I even had an hour-long debate with the spiritual counselor here, trying to dissuade him from the belief that there's a higher power who cares about the fate of every individual. — Neil Strauss

Everyone seems agreed that writing about sex is perilous, partly because it threatens to swamp highly individualised characters in a generic, featureless activity (much like coffee-cup dialogue, during which everyone sounds the same), and partly because it feels ... tacky. — Edmund White

The audience
the book's actual cast
quickly realized what had happened. The reason the movie dropped everything that made the novel real was because there was no way the parents who ran the studio would ever expose their children in the same black light the book did. The movie was begging for our sympathy whereas the book didn't give a shit. And attitudes about drugs and sex had shifted quickly from 1985 to 1987 (and a regime change at the studio didn't help) so the source material
surprisingly conservative despite its surface immorality
had to be reshaped. — Bret Easton Ellis

The whole issue of the effects of trash like this is awash in confucion. Studies sow that men who watch porn commit fewer rapes. It also has bad affects on young children, who mostly watch it on the internet around page 11, and later and try to emulate what they saw, with disastrous results. Reduces people to objects. Same with that kind of writing. I wrote a book (Selling Sex In The 21st Century) after years of research, including these subjects, and science and surveys are not consistent, do not explain the reality. Variety is the reality. Most theories are sometimes right, sometimes wrong. It's easy to gab on to a position andchapmion it, but the truth isn't so simple. . — James Tugend

My TV show enraged people. I had prostitutes on, and I treated them like real people ... I was fired from Maclean's after I wrote a piece called 'Let's Stop Hoaxing The Kids About Sex'. Now I'm the 'beloved author,' the 'beloved historian of Canada,' an icon. I get standing ovations ... I never set out to be a patriot or a popular historian. I just liked storytelling. [interview promoting Marching as to War (2002)] — Pierre Berton

It's not what's happened or what's about to happen; what's important is the sense of emotional uncertainty between the characters and the delicacy of the mutual trust being established. — Diana Gabaldon

I began wanting to create a detective who really turned the tables on that image of women, to know that you could have a sex life and not be a bad person. You could have a sex life and still solve your own problems. It was eight years from when I started having the fantasy that I was going to create such a detective to when I actually sat down and came up with V. I. Warshawski. It was a long, slow journey to come to a writing voice and do that character. — Sara Paretsky

In ballet, any dancer who asks himself what step comes next must freeze. Any man who takes a sex manual to bed with him invites frigidity. Dancing, sex, writing a novel
all are a living process, quick thought, emotion making yet more quick thought, and so on, cycling round. — Ray Bradbury

I am compulsive about writing, I need to do it the way I need sleep and exercise and food and sex; I can go without it for a while, but then I need it. — John Irving

I think it's common sense to shy away from the erotic. Perhaps this grand experiment, which started with Lady Chatterley's Lover, of seeing what you can write and how you can write about sex, has reached a certain weary terminus with Fifty Shades of Grey. — Richard Flanagan

If you can't look a line of dialogue in the face and say exactly why it's there - take it out or change it. — Diana Gabaldon

I'm twenty-seven and as of writing this, I haven't had sex in two years, six months, three days, and two and a half hours. It's a situation that I wish upon no one. — Olive B. Persimmon

Writing, like drugs and recreational sex, becomes an activity associated with youth. — Betsy Lerner

India went through a dramatic revolution after the '90s when our economy started opening up for the first time and Indians were now experiencing the Western life, if you will. Drugs and sex and a lot of those influences came in as the economy stabilized, and we were growing up and experiencing that. The Indian writing market was very small at that time. Our literature was very attuned to what Western audiences were interested in, so everybody was writing about the slums in India and magic realism or stories about Hindus and Muslims and partition. — Karan Bajaj

I am perfectly capable of writing things about myself that one doesn't discuss in polite company, but I was raised by people who said you don't discuss politics, you don't discuss religion, and you certainly don't discuss people's sex lives. — Kathryn Harrison

Some writers research in order to write. I write in order to research topics that interest me. Especially if I can meet with other people, in forums from illness support groups to phone-sex hotlines, and learn what other people know best. — Chuck Palahniuk

What is your advice to young writers?"
"Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes. — Charles Bukowski

I am a scholar and a pupil who has been lulled to sleep by the meagre fire of a mind too humble. I have been too much burned, and my injured mind has accumulated too much passion; for tormenting itself with the defending of our sex, my mind sighs, conscious of its obligation. For all things - those deeply rooted inside us as well as those outside us - are being laid at the door of our sex.
In addition, I, who have always held virtue in high esteem and considered private things as secondary importance, shall wear down and exhaust my pen writing against those men who are garrulous and puffed up with false pride. I shall not fail to obstruct tenaciously their treacherous snares. And I shall strive a war of vengeance against the notorious abuse of those who fill everything with noise, since armed with such abuse, certain insane and infamous men bark and bare their teeth in vicious wrath at the republic of women, so worthy of veneration. — Laura Cereta

People have many cruel expectations from writers. People expect novelists to live on a hill with three kids and a spouse, people expect children's story writers to never have sex, and people expect all great poets to be dead. And these are all very difficult expectations to fulfill, I think. — C. JoyBell C.

I never use the word 'sex' in my novels - that is not what romance is about. It's about love and emotion. All my stories were different but they all had a happy ending - the perfect finish to any romance. — Jean S. MacLeod

Space opera, as every reader doubtless knows, is a pejorative term often applied to a story that has an element of adventure. Over the decades, brilliant and talented new writers appear, receiving great acclaim, and each and every one of them can be expected to write at least one article stating flatly that the day of space opera is over and done, thank goodness, and that henceforth these crude tales of interplanetary nonsense will be replaced by whatever type of story that writer happens to favor - closet dramas, psychological dramas, sex dramas, etc., but by God important dramas, containing nothing but Big Thinks. Ten years late, the writer in question may or may not still be around, but the space opera can be found right where it always was, sturdily driving its dark trade in heroes. — Leigh Brackett

Plotting is like sex. Plotting is about desire and satisfaction, anticipation and release. You have to arouse your reader's desire to know what happens, to unravel the mystery, to see good triumph. You have to sustain it, keep it warm, feed it, just a little bit, not too much at a time, as your story goes on. That's called suspense. It can bring desire to a frenzy, in which case you are in a good position to bring off a wonderful climax. — Colin Greenland

I always feel super uncomfortable when it's like ah, there probably has to be a sex scene. I feel really bad and then always look around to see if anyone is watching me while I'm writing. I want to apologize to people who have to read those sex scenes, but I feel like it's part of the characters life, it's important. — Joe Meno

When I met a truly beautiful girl, I would tell her that if she spent the night with me, I would write a novel or a story about her. This usually worked; and if her name was to be in the title of the story, it almost always worked. Then, later, when we'd passed a night of delicious love-making together, after she'd gone and I'd felt that feeling of happiness mixed with sorrow, I sometimes would write a book or story about her. Sometimes her character, her way about herself, her love-making, it sometimes marked me so heavily that I couldn't go on in life and be happy unless I wrote a book or a story about that woman, the happy and sad memory of that woman. That was the only way to keep her, and to say goodbye to her without her ever leaving. — Roman Payne

I avoid writing about sex out of a certainty that no matter how grown up and matter-of-fact I might try to be, there is a snickering yet nun-terrorized 12-year-old-boy inside me who would at some point be certain to grab the reins in his hairy palms. — Lynn Coady

I write about what I know: sex, pornography, art, fame obsession, drugs, and alcohol. I mean, why would anyone care to listen to me if I wasn't an expert in what I write about? — Lady Gaga

Plotting isn't like sex, because you can go back and adjust it afterwards. Whether you plan your story beforehand or not, if the climax turns out to be the revelation that the mad professor's anti-gravity device actually works, you must go back and silently delete all those flying cars buzzing around the city on page one. If you want to reveal something, you need to hide it properly first. — Colin Greenland

Don't go overboard in avoiding "said." Basically, "said" is the default for dialogue, and a good thing, too; it's an invisible word that doesn't draw attention to itself. — Diana Gabaldon

The book is almost always better than the movie. You could have no better case in point than FROM HELL, Alan Moore's best graphic novel to date, brilliantly illustrated by Eddie Campbell. It's hard to describe just how much better the book is.
It's like, "If the movie was an episode of Battlestar Galactica with a guest appearance by the Smurfs and everyone spoke Dutch, the graphic novel is Citizen Kane with added sex scenes and music by your favourite ten bands and everyone in the world you ever hated dies at the end."
That's how much better it is. — Warren Ellis

My essay had evolved into thinking about fucking. You could be raped a thousand times and still be a virgin. I was writing about fucking by a master and fucking as a slave, about Hegel, the comfort women and teenage porno stars. Ms. Bain and Mr. Rotowsky could fail me, I didn't care. I'd pass just with the bibliography. I was compiling a list of every single book I'd read or that I wanted to read that was about power and sex. High school should have a whole fucking course on just this. I was helping the school make curriculum ...
I was writing my essay, writing easily now. I didn't have a reader anymore like Lee or Chris but I imagined that I was writing for them both. Maybe I was writing for anyone who could fucking stand me. — Tamara Faith Berger

I think it's an American curse that most of us think we are special ... everyone believes themselves to be superior to the majority of the population in some way. Sometimes it's their looks, other times their perceived sex appeal (often in obvious defiance of their looks), and other times it is their real or imagined talent for acting, writing, painting or banging on the drums. And because people are so susceptible to flattery, there exists an entire industry made up of scam artists whose sole goal is to fleece the flatterable. — Fay Faron

The dogged effort to "denaturalize" gender in this text emerges, I think, from a strong desire both to counter the normative violence implied by ideal morphologies of sex and to uproot the pervasive assumptions about natural or presumptive heterosexuality that are informed by ordinary and academic discourses on sexuality. The writing of this denaturalization was not done simply out of a desire to play with language or prescribe theatrical antics in the place of "real" politics, as some critics have conjectured (as if theatre and politics are always distinct). It was done from a desire to live, to make life possible, and to rethink the possible as such. — Judith Butler

I have even taught classes on writing about sex, and I've looked closely at different writers' sex scenes. On the level of craft I've given it a lot of thought. The pitfalls are simple: It can sound clinical or medical, which isn't right, or pornographic, because the characters disappear. — K.M. Soehnlein

Sex and writing live on playful cruelties. — Mason Cooley

- Have you ever written the ending of the story first and then the rest of it?
- Hell no, I've never had an orgasm before having sex. — Enkelejd Lamaj

Huddled in her mink in the Kansas City airport, she had a vision of women writing about sex as openly as male writers, but quite, quite differently. Some women would treat sex much as men did,as conquest, as adventure
in a way as McCarthy had. Other women would treat female sexuality far less romantically then men who did not consider themselves romantics, like Hemingway, were wont to. The earth would not move, no, there would be more biology and less theatrics. Women had less ego involvement in sex than men did, but far more at stake economically. — Marge Piercy

She was also sure that having experienced the act first hand would probably benefit her writing. If anything she should have sex for her job. Yes, she definitely owed it to her readers to go out and have sex. — R.L. Mathewson

That's my goal, is to stay in a truthful place. And sometimes that means writing a silly song, or singing about sex or singing about environmental destruction or heartbreak, or my grandmother. The subject isn't what the core is about, it's about truthfulness and authenticity and that just comes from my heart and soul. — Mirah

Women writers make for rewarding (and efficient) lovers. They are clever liars to fathers and husbands; yet they never hold their tongues too long, nor keep ardent typing fingers still. — Roman Payne

Someone from the Internet Writing Workshop sent me a link to the Gender Genie, where you paste in a section of text and it uses an algorithm to detect whether the author is male or female. Or, if you're an author, you can tell whether you're really nailing your opposite-sex characters. I mean, nailing their dialog. — Max Barry

Writing about sex at length is a bit like describing mastication at length. It's the causes and the consequences and the meaning of it that are interesting, not the anatomical descriptions. — Richard Flanagan

Death row groupies mystify me. These women spend their lives visiting the condemned religiously, writing them daily, falling in love with them, and marrying them if they can. For some women, perhaps, condemned killers have that special aura or sex appeal. Apparently it gratifies their sense of romance or martyrdom. — Robert Blecker

Jamie's viewpoint is expressed almost entirely in metaphor: If she was broken, she would slash him with her jagged edges, reckless as a drunkard with a shattered bottle. He's using physical language, but he isn't talking about the physical details of the situation. Claire alludes to her emotion and shows it by her actions, but Jamie is thinking directly in pure emotions. — Diana Gabaldon

I am not covetous, but as ambitious as ever any of my sex was, is, or can be; which makes, that though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavour to be Margaret the First; and although I have neither power, time, not occasion to conquer the world as Alexander and Caesar did; yet rather than not be mistress of one, since Fortune and Fates would give me none, I have made a world of my own; for which nobody, I hope, will blame me, since it is in everyone's power to do the like. — Margaret Cavendish

Ribbons I can see the artwork in my head, a dark background with a girl's naked body, melting from her hips down into ribbons of red. The image fits this song to a T. It's a bout breaking down and finding yourself in sex. I think Naomi started writing it before she'd ever had any. Only virgins are this dirty. — C.M. Stunich

Writing is like sex. The more you think about it, the harder it is to do. It's better not to think about it so much and just let it happen. — Stephen King

Wherein we discover that many of the "rules" for good writing and good sex are the same: Keep your hand moving, lose control, and don't think. — Natalie Goldberg

The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people's diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming. — Cheryl Strayed

The best way of writing sex scenes is to do the first draft, orgasm, and then start editing. You can be objective post-orgasm. — Christos Tsiolkas

If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen. — Dashiell Hammett

Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money. — Virginia Woolf

Ian Fleming may have been very practical about writing James Bond, but at heart he was a romantic. He ... was tapping directly into a deep wellspring of his own imagination, which he laced with the usual blend of sex, travel, culinary detail and fine living that encapsulated the aspirations of the age, and was absolutely an expression of Fleming himself. He may have dismissed his creation as idle fantasy, but he was entirely serious about the world he had created ... Ian Fleming could not put any clear water between himself and his fiction because he was living his work as he wrote it ... To discover the origins of James Bond one has to begin by exploring the deep streams that fed the well of Fleming's imagination, and his own complicated personality. — Henry Chancellor

You could imagine writing about a prostitute, for instance, but if you haven't spent time with prostitutes then you're going to get all these details wrong. But if you have a lot of sex with prostitutes and you're friends with prostitutes and you interview prostitutes, then maybe after many, many years you might be able to create prostitute characters. — William T. Vollmann

Although there appears to be a deep desire to approach dating, marriage, and sex in a way that pleases God, there nevertheless seems to be a profound lack of wisdom and practical know-how. There is a sizable gap between our understanding of the gospel and our knowledge of the Scriptures on one hand and our application of that knowledge on the other. The sheer amount of confusion, heartbreak, and fear that I have witnessed at The Village Church in regard to romantic relationships and sex provides my primary motivation for writing this book. — Matt Chandler

I think I was born to write. My mother would put a typewriter on the dining room table and say "there you go".

My first story was published in the Christian Herald and they would pay me five guineas. I wrote my first novel when I was just 14.

I was into mysteries and thrillers at the time but I eventually I drifted into romance because my mother would always ask me to write 'something pretty'.

I've never got bored of it because its something I absolutely love. My books are full of hope and romance rather than sex.

They are a form of escapism - you can escape the parts of the world that you don't like. — Ida Pollock

He looked at a picture on the wall and saw everything that existed outside the room he was sitting in and the one he was trying to write about. It was a picture of fishing nets stowed in canvas baskets and it had sex, memories, cravings, names of old friends, principal rivers of the world. Writing was bad for the soul when you got right down to it. It protected your worst tendencies. Narrowed everything to failure and its devastations. Gave your cunning an edge of treachery and your jellyfish heart a reason to fall deeper into silence. — Don DeLillo

There really is no difference in the actual writing or plotting. I choose to tell different stories for the younger reader and, of course, I would never put sex and extreme violence in a YA book. But writing for adults and children requires the same care and attention. — Michael Scott

Neither black/red/yellow nor woman but poet or writer. For many of us, the question of priorities remains a crucial issue. Being merely "a writer" without a doubt ensures one a status of far greater weight than being "a woman of color who writes" ever does. Imputing race or sex to the creative act has long been a means by which the literary establishment cheapens and discredits the achievements of non-mainstream women writers. She who "happens to be" a (non-white) Third World member, a woman, and a writer is bound to go through the ordeal of exposing her work to the abuse and praises and criticisms that either ignore, dispense with, or overemphasize her racial and sexual attributes. Yet the time has passed when she can confidently identify herself with a profession or artistic vocation without questioning and relating it to her color-woman condition. — Trinh T. Minh-ha

You don't need to know the purpose as you write, but when you read over something you've written, you should be able to point to any given element - be that a line of dialogue, a descriptive phrase, a plot point - and say why it's there. — Diana Gabaldon

People don't think of writers as sex objects. The women who write to me and suggest that we ought to have sex usually turn out to be, like, eighty. And their letters always end with, "Just joking." — Dave Barry

You know who does a lot of good deeds and doesn't have kids and totally understands what's important in life? George Clooney. Unlike me, he doesn't give a fuck what you think about the fact that he's not "selfless" enough to father a kid. He's not writing a book defending his position. He's having sex with a cocktail waitress and then saving Darfur. Both are noble positions. — Jen Kirkman

I dunno, when I started writing really I was like, filling out applications and stuff real early. Last name first, first name last, sex ... occasionally, stuff like that. Then I was writing letters, filling out forms, writing on bathroom walls ... — Tom Waits

When people say, 'But what is acceptable in erotica?' I sometimes answer them by saying: there are certain taboos and limits in writing about sex as a positive, enjoyable, blissful, exciting activity. There are no taboos and limits whatsoever to describing the same sexual activities if they are traumatic, horrible, full of suffering and disgust. You can describe anything. — Senta Holland

I've never really suffered complete and utter writer's block, really. I equate it with sex: in the beginning of my career, I was writing five songs a week; now, I occasionally write a song. But it's an exciting moment when it happens! — Loudon Wainwright III

When I was writing Green Girl,I was reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, and she's very dismissive of the young girl. She writes about the girl as being from this space of bad faith and blankness. I'm more interested in a messy space. — Kate Zambreno

You want to anchor the scene with physical details, but by and large it's better to use sensual details rather than overtly sexual ones. — Diana Gabaldon

Get thee behind me, tragedy. Kneeling over her, he lifted her and impaled her gently on his sex. — Anne Rice

Writing about sex is a challenge for the same reason sex is a challenge. Because it's complicated. Because it doesn't always make sense and it isn't always perfect and it's sometimes awful and it's sometimes hilarious. But underneath all the clever wordplay, it's about hope. Hope that someone will see us, and accept us, and perhaps - after all that - choose us. It's the barest we will ever be. The barest a character will ever be. That's why it's difficult.
As for what makes a good sex scene, a romance novelist would have told you that when done well and with a skilled hand, the best sex scenes can at once arouse and empower. Sex on the page gives readers the freedom to explore their own sexuality, their own pleasures, their own identities. With hope. And without judgment. — Sarah MacLean

I just write about what comes up. Sometimes you're thinking about Palestine, and sometimes you're thinking about sex. People have a lot going on. — Mirah

There's always something new with sex. We lived in a world without Viagra, now we live in a world with Viagra. We lived in a world without blowjobs and anilingus in the Oval Office, and then it happens and you get to write about it. We live in a world where now the government is screwing with contraception and holding back vaccines that could save 4,000 women's lives a year, and you get to write about that. It's not as much fun as anilingus in the Oval Office, but what are you going to do? If you pay attention, there's always something new, and it's always really invigorating. — Dan Savage