Colleen McCullough Quotes
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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.
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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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It's a dead give away of an inexperienced writer if every character speaks with the same voice.
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It's no fun to be a bluestocking in a family of jockstraps.
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I hate being on my best behavior. It brings out the absolute worst in me.
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What was sleep? A blessing, a respite from life, an echo of death, a demanding nuisance?
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It means I don't have much depth of vision.
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It's a woman's book but I think the men will read it too.
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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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It is one of the biggest, best sellers of all time.
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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.
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Perfection, in anything, is unbearably dull. Myself, I prefer a touch of imperfection.
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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.
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The best is only bought at the cost of great pain...or so says the legend.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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She looked like the sort of woman most men would want to get to know because they weren't sure what went on inside.
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Truly God was good, to make man so blind.
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The most insoluble problems are those which by their very nature can have no space within them for dreams.
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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.
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The lovely thing about being forty is that you can appreciate twenty-five-year-old men more.
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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.