Colleen McCullough quotes:

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

I stopped this one about two months before federation and I want the next one to be more political. It will deal with the formation of white Australian policy and things like that.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Old age is an ordeal, of flesh and mind. Of winding down, of slowing down, of dying cells. It's accepting the loss of physical attractiveness and replacing it with the power and wisdom that can only come with old age.

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

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.

Yet there's something ominous about turning sixty-five. Suddenly old age is not a phenomenon which will occur; it has occurred.

We are not here together just to make children, Elizabeth. What we're going to do is sanctified by marriage. It's an act of love - of love. Not merely of the flesh, but of the mind and even the soul. There's nothing about it you shouldn't welcome.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

He owe his wife a debt he couldn't hope to pay with any coin save one: open the cage and let the bird fly.

Do you realize that you've been married to me for just about half of your entire life?Her head came down, her eyes opened wide to stare at him. Is that all? she asked. It seems an eternity.Did I say a quiet lion? Alexander pulled a face. An eternity with me has turned you into a bitch, my dear.

I have discovered, he said to Charles Dewy, that when a man marries, peace of mind and freedom go out of the window.Well, old boy, said Charles comfortably, that's the price we have to pay for having company in our old age and for ensuring that we have heirs to follow us.

Belief doesn't rest on proof or existence...it rests on faith...without faith there is nothing.

But work used to be the lot of every man, and now it is rapidly becoming an aristocratic privilege. Men nowadays are more often paid not to work.

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

Each of us has something within us which won't be denied, even if it makes us scream aloud to die. We are what we are, that's all. Like the old Celtic legend of the bird with the thorn in its breast, singing its heart out and dying. Because it has to, its self-knowledge can't affect or change the outcome, can it? Everyone singing his own little song, convinced it's the most wonderful song the world has ever heard. Don't you see? We create our own thorns, and never stop to count the cost. All we can do is suffer the pain, and tell ourselves it was well worth it.

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

There's a story... a legend, about a bird that sings just once in its life. From the moment it leaves its nest, it searches for a thorn tree... and never rests until it's found one. And then it sings... more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. And singing, it impales itself on the longest, sharpest thorn. But, as it dies, it rises above its own agony, to outsing the lark and the nightingale. The thorn bird pays its life for just one song, but the whole world stills to listen, and God in his heaven smiles.

I hate being on my best behavior. It brings out the absolute worst in me.

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

Love and hate are cruel, only liking is kind

The bird with the thorn in its breast, it follows an immutable law; it is driven by it knows not what to impale itself, and die singing. At the very instant the thorn enters there is no awareness in it of the dying to come; it simply sings and sings until there is not the life left to utter another note. But we, when we put the thorns in our breasts, we know. We understand. And still we do it. Still we do it.

And gradually his memory slipped a little, as memories do, even those with so much love attached to them; as if there is an unconscious healing process within the mind which mends up in spite of our desperate determination never to forget.

Perfection, in anything, is unbearably dull. Myself, I prefer a touch of imperfection.

That's the purpose of old age... To give us a breathing space before we die, in which to see why we did what we did.

How frightening, that one person could mean so much, so many things.

When we press the thorn to our chest we know, we understand, and still we do it.

There is no doubt that it is more difficult to read and more difficult to write but I still manage.

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

It's no fun to be a bluestocking in a family of jockstraps.

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

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

...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 most insoluble problems are those which by their very nature can have no space within them for dreams.

Best of all she liked his eyes, such a translucent golden brown, and so laughing.

Twelve thousand miles of it, to the other side of the world. And whether they came home again or not, they would belong neither here, nor there, for they would have lived on two continents and sampled two different ways of life.

My books and other works are my legacy, and it's a great comfort to know that mine is a legacy of pleasure for other people.

We're working-class people, which means we don't get rich or have maids. Be content with what you are and what you have.

There was some justice in his pain

Truly God was good, to make man so blind.

In The Touch, the love scenes are the same as they were in The Thorn Birds or anything else Ive 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.

..the best is only bought at the cost of great pain...or so says the legend