'I wanted something 100% pornographic and 100% high art': the joy of writing about sex | Books | The Guardian

There is a widely held belief, among English-language writers, that sex is impossible to write about well - or at least much harder to write about well than anything else. I once heard a wonderful writer, addressing students at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, say that her ideal of a sex scene would be the sentence: "They sat down on the sofa ..." followed by white space. This is a prejudice I can't understand. One of the glories of being a writer in English is that two of our earliest geniuses, Chaucer and Shakespeare, wrote of the sexual body so exuberantly, claiming it for literature and bringing its vocabulary - including all those wonderful four-letter words - into the texture of our literary language. This is a gift not all languages have received; a translator once complained to me that in her language there was only the diction of the doctor's office or of pornography, neither of which felt native to poetry.