Colleen McCullough Quotes
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In early draft it never satisfied me, and that was when it clicked into place and it went so well as a diary.
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There are no ambitions noble enough to justify breaking someone's heart.
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There is no doubt that it is more difficult to read and more difficult to write but I still manage.
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If you love people, they kill you. If you need people, they kill you. They do I tell you!
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There's a hell of a lot of horny people out there who are not being gratified in the way they should be.
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I escaped the torture of my childhood home by reading. To this day it is still one of my greatest pleasures.
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Belief doesn't rest on proof or existence...it rests on faith...without faith there is nothing.
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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.
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I think explicit love scenes are a turn off unless it's the kind you read with one hand.
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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.
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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.
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Love and hate are cruel, only liking is kind.
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I want to know what they look like, their height, and colouring, physique and speech pattens.
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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.
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When we press the thorn to our chest we know, we understand, and still we do it.
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I have an editor in my head, that's why I can't read Harry Potter, because Rowling is such a lousy writer.
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Duty, the most indecent of all obsessions, was only another name for love.
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They (the publishers) would be ecstatic, I just refuse to. You can't repeat a great act.
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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.
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It's a woman's book but I think the men will read it too.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It means I don't have much depth of vision.