-
It's no fun to be a bluestocking in a family of jockstraps.
Colleen McCullough -
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.
Colleen McCullough
-
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.
Colleen McCullough -
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.
Colleen McCullough -
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.
Colleen McCullough -
The best is only bought at the cost of great pain...or so says the legend.
Colleen McCullough -
What was sleep? A blessing, a respite from life, an echo of death, a demanding nuisance?
Colleen McCullough -
It is one of the biggest, best sellers of all time.
Colleen McCullough
-
It's a dead give away of an inexperienced writer if every character speaks with the same voice.
Colleen McCullough -
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.
Colleen McCullough -
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.
Colleen McCullough -
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.
Colleen McCullough -
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.
Colleen McCullough -
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.
Colleen McCullough
-
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.
Colleen McCullough -
Truly God was good, to make man so blind.
Colleen McCullough -
She looked like the sort of woman most men would want to get to know because they weren't sure what went on inside.
Colleen McCullough -
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.
Colleen McCullough -
The lovely thing about being forty is that you can appreciate twenty-five-year-old men more.
Colleen McCullough -
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.
Colleen McCullough
-
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."
Colleen McCullough -
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.
Colleen McCullough -
The most insoluble problems are those which by their very nature can have no space within them for dreams.
Colleen McCullough -
Best of all she liked his eyes, such a translucent golden brown, and so laughing.
Colleen McCullough