Love Quote by Colleen McCullough

McCullough lands the line like a dinner-party grenade: polite talk about romance punctured by the blunt mechanics of arousal. The joke is structural. She sets up a mild, almost priggish complaint - explicit love scenes are a "turn off" - then swivels into a wink that admits the only explicitness she’ll tolerate is pornography, the kind designed for solitary consumption. The one-hand punchline is doing two jobs at once: it’s a bawdy aside, and it’s a critique of literary pretension about sex.

The intent feels less like prudishness than a demand for honesty about what sex-on-the-page is for. If a scene is explicit, McCullough implies, it should either be erotica that commits to its purpose or fiction that uses sex to reveal character, power, vulnerability, or consequence. The real target is the in-between: the dutifully steamy passage that mistakes anatomical detail for intimacy and confuses reader titillation with narrative heat.

Context matters. McCullough wrote blockbuster historical romance (The Thorn Birds) in an era when mainstream fiction was negotiating the line between “serious” literature and commercial sensuality, especially for women writers who were often patronized either way. This quip flips that bind. She refuses to be shamed by sex, but she also refuses to sanctify it. The cynicism is bracing: stop pretending the page can smuggle pornography under the banner of art, and stop pretending art needs pornography to feel adult.