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.”

“He was, he admitted, a man who liked to have his cake and eat it too.”

“We can know what we do wrong even before we do it, but 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.”

“We are not here together just to make children, Elizabeth. What we're going to do is sanctified by marriage. It's an act of love - of love. Not merely of the flesh, but of the mind and even the soul. There's nothing about it you shouldn't welcome.”

“There is a legend about a bird which sings just once in its life, more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. From the moment it leaves the nest it searches for a thorn tree, and does not rest until it has found one. Then, singing among the savage branches, it impales itself upon the longest, sharpest spine. And, dying, it rises above its own agony to outcarol the lark and the nightingale. One superlative song, existence the price. But the whole world stills to listen, and God in His heaven smiles. For the best is only bought at the cost of great pain… Or so says the legend.”

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

“But work used to be the lot of every man, and now it is rapidly becoming an aristocratic privilege. Men nowadays are more often paid not to work.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Do you realize that you've been married to me for just about half of your entire life?"Her head came down, her eyes opened wide to stare at him. "Is that all?" she asked. "It seems an eternity"."Did I say a quiet lion?" Alexander pulled a face. "An eternity with me has turned you into a bitch, my dear".”

“The best thing about being 40 is that you can appreciate 25-year-old men more.”

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

“Until you can leave the matter of forgiveness to God, you will not have acquired true humility.”

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

“Suddenly the thought that the end of her life was imminent shocked him; it was one thing to pity someone he didn't know, quite another to face the same dilemma with someone he knew intimately. That was the trouble with beds. They turned strangers into intimates more quickly than ten years of polite teas in parlours.”

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

“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.”

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

“Luke’s not a bad man, or even an unlikable one,” she went on. “Just a man. You’re all the same, great big hairy moths bashing yourselves to pieces after a silly flame behind a glass so clear your eyes don’t see it. And if you do manage to blunder your way inside the glass to fly into the flame, you fall down burned and dead.While all the time out there in the cool night there’s food, and love, and baby moths to get. But do you see it, do you want it? No! It’s back after the flame again, beating yourselves senseless until you burn yourselves dead!”