Colleen McCullough Quotes (34 Quotes)

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

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

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

For the best is only bought at the cost of great pain.

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

It's not worth getting upset about, Mrs. Dominic. Down in the city they don't know how the other half lives, and they can afford the luxury of doting on their animals as if they were children. Out here it's different. You'll never see man, woman or child in need of help go ignored out here, yet in the city those same people who dote on their pets will completely ignore a cry of help from a human being.

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

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

There was some justice in his pain

Truly God was good, to make man so blind.

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

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.

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

Forty-four years is about as close to modern life as I want to go because I know now, from where I am, what was important about 1960 in social terms.

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

They should all have their own speech patterns with their own tics and little foibles. It's fun working all that out ahead of time.

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

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.

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

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

YOU DON'T HAVE TO WALK IN A MAN'S SHOES TO KNOW WHERE HE'S BEEN. ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS, BUY HIM A NEW PAIR, TO GET HIM TO WHERE HE'S GOING.

It's a woman's book but I think the men will read it too.

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

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.

I lived in the US for donkeys' years so it has been a journey back in time for me. If you have had personal experience of something, it is always more authentic.

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.

It is one of the biggest, best sellers of all time,

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

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 wanted it (the book) to set my cop a very difficult task, which is to find out whodunit' without any of the modern aids of DNA testing and the like,

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.

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

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 will never use swear words unless they're necessary and unless I feel that is what the character would have said in those circumstances.