For sex scenes, I just write about someone eating a sandwich and replace "ham & cheese hoagie" with "perfect breasts."

The line is a comic, self-deprecating way of describing the problem of writing sex: how to render bodily immediacy without lapsing into cliché, embarrassment, or unintended comedy. By likening erotic description to the mundane act of describing a sandwich and then swapping in sexual nouns (“perfect breasts”), the speaker suggests that the mechanics of prose—rhythm, sequencing, sensory detail—can be formulaic, and that “sex writing” often relies on interchangeable stock phrases. The joke also hints at a larger Roth-associated theme: the tension between frankness and artifice, and the suspicion that language can cheapen what it tries to intensify.