Wit & Attitude Quote by Colleen McCullough

There is a sly professionalism in McCullough admitting her love scenes are "the same" across books: she deflates the mystique of the romance set piece and reframes it as craft, not confession. In an era when blockbuster novels were expected to deliver sex as spectacle (and when female authors were often pressed to prove they could write it), she treats intimacy like any other narrative instrument: repeatable, reliable, tuned for effect.

The key move is her binary shorthand: "heaven or hell". It sounds blunt, almost melodramatic, but it functions like a thermostat rather than a detailed weather report. McCullough isn't interested in anatomizing desire on the page; she wants the emotional temperature to spike. That’s why she stresses "leaves room for the reader". The subtext is control disguised as generosity. By withholding explicit choreography, she recruits the audience to finish the scene, letting each reader import their own private images, thresholds, and history. The result can feel more intimate than explicit description, because it happens inside the reader's head, where censorship and self-revelation are personal.

Context matters: McCullough wrote sweeping, popular epics like The Thorn Birds, books that had to satisfy a mass readership without alienating the cautious or boring the adventurous. Her method is a pragmatic compromise and a shrewd one: suggestive extremity ("heaven or hell") plus strategic omission. She’s also quietly pushing back against the idea that sex scenes must be endlessly innovative to be "good". For her, the novelty is in character and consequence, not in new synonyms for skin.