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.

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...

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.

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.

There's a little trick called the Rule of Three: if you use any three of the five senses, it will make the scene immediately three-dimensional.

Good sex scene is about the exchange of emotions, not bodily fluids

every now and then, i worry about people in the third world countries. and then i figure if they all started having sex, their lives would be considerably brighter.

The rest is just sex, copulation, the perpetuation of the vile species.

We {men} would rather lose an arm out a city bus window than tell you simply, "You're not theone." We are quite sure you will kill us or yourself or both-or even worse, cry and yell at us.

A man who wouldn't cheat for a poke don't want one bad enough. --Augustus "Gus" McCrae

We returned to the hotel and had intercourse. I like that word . It poses only a limited range of possibilities.

I wasn't in love with her. And she didn't love me. For me the question of love was irrelevant. What I sought was the sense of being tossed about by some raging, savage force, in the midst of which lay...

All my life I wanted to go to bed with an American, and now I had, and I'm beginning to see why people don't do it more often.

The difference between sex with David and sex with Stephen is like the difference between science and art. With Stephen it's all empathy and imagination and exploration and the shock of the new, and...

The religion of orgasm: utilitarianism projected into sex life; efficiency versus indolence; coition reduced to an obstacle to be got past as quickly as possible in order to reach an ecstatic...

They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future. There was nothing but obliterating sensation, thrilling and swelling, and the sound of fabric on fabric and skin on fabric...

I have tutored Little Igor to be a man of this world. For example, I exhibited him a smutty magazine three days yore, so that he should be appraised of the many positions in which I am carnal. 'This...

I know a lot about birds and bees, but I don't know very much about the birds and the bees. Everything I do know I had to teach myself on the Internet, because I don't have anyone to ask. For example,...

It had a sort of a head on it, like a mushroom, and its color was reddish purple. It looked blunt and stupid, compared, say, to fingers and toes with their intelligent expressiveness, or even to an...

Someday every woman will have orgasms- like every family has color TV- and we can all get on with the business of life.

Sex is what you boast about when you have no exterior signs of wealth. It's a way of saying, Look, I might not own a fancy sport coat, or even a carry-on bag, but I do have two women and all the...

Lying flat against the tile of the kitchen floor listening to someone else have sex is essentially my early twenties in a nutshell.

If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called 'sex' is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the...

He found Luciana sitting alone at a table in the Allied officers' night club, where the drunken Anzac major who had brought her there had been stupid enough to desert her for the ribald company of...

She was made for untidy rooms and rumpled beds.