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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It's no fun to be a bluestocking in a family of jockstraps.
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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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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.
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I hate being on my best behavior. It brings out the absolute worst in me.
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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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It is one of the biggest, best sellers of all time.
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What was sleep? A blessing, a respite from life, an echo of death, a demanding nuisance?
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The best is only bought at the cost of great pain...or so says the legend.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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The lovely thing about being forty is that you can appreciate twenty-five-year-old men more.
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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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Perfection, in anything, is unbearably dull. Myself, I prefer a touch of imperfection.
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Truly God was good, to make man so blind.
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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."
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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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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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Yet there's something ominous about turning sixty-five. Suddenly old age is not a phenomenon which will occur; it has occurred.
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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.