Quotes from Colleen McCullough

She told fortunes for a living. It's a wacky book and was great fun to write. It is very much a look at what life was like for women in Australia in the 1960's.

Truly God was good, to make man so blind.

Oh, that feels good! I don't know who invented ties and then insisted a man was only properly dressed when he wore one, but if I ever meet him, I'll strangle him with his own invention

My husband says it is very good that I have very tiny feet, because they're easier to get in my mouth.

I escaped the torture of my childhood home by reading. To this day it is still one of my greatest pleasures.

I have an editor in my head, that's why I can't read Harry Potter, because Rowling is such a lousy writer.

In early draft it never satisfied me, and that was when it clicked into place and it went so well as a diary.

My fictitious characters will take the bit between their teeth and gallop off and do something that I hadn't counted on. However, I always insist on dragging them back to the straight and narrow.

What was sleep? A blessing, a respite from life, an echo of death, a demanding nuisance?

There are no ambitions noble enough to justify breaking someone's heart.

If you love people, they kill you. If you need people, they kill you. They do I tell you!

There's a hell of a lot of horny people out there who are not being gratified in the way they should be.

Love and hate are cruel, only liking is kind

duty, the most indecent of all obsessions, was only another name for love.

I think explicit love scenes are a turn off unless it's the kind you read with one hand.

In The Touch, the love scenes are the same as they were in The Thorn Birds or anything else I've ever written. I find a way of saying that either it was heaven or hell but in a way that still leaves room for the reader to use their own imagination.

Once I've got the first draft down on paper then I do five or six more drafts, the last two of which will be polishing drafts. The ones in between will flesh out the characters and maybe I'll check my research.

Until you can leave the matter of forgiveness to God, you will not have acquired true humility.

The Labour Party of today has fits of horrors of the very thought of somebody like me might saying that they bought in white Australia. But I believe they did.

I am writing a sequel to The Touch because I want to further explore the Chinese question that I have raised. There will be more about that in a sequel.

...she looked like the sort of woman most men would want to get to know because they weren't sure what went on inside.

The lovely thing about being forty is that you can appreciate twenty-five-year-old men more.

It's a dead give away of an inexperienced writer if every character speaks with the same voice.

I want to know what they look like, their height, and colouring, physique and speech pattens.