Colleen McCullough

“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.”

“He owe his wife a debt he couldn't hope to pay with any coin save one: open the cage and let the bird fly.”

“I want to know what they look like, their height, and colouring, physique and speech pattens.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Dr. Murray made it clear to me before I left that a woman who enhoys the Act is as loose as a harlot. God gives pleasure in it only to husbands. Women are the source of evil and temptation, therefore women are to blame when men fall into fleshly error. It was Eve who seduced Adam, Eve who entered into league with the serpent, who was the Devil in disguise. So the only pleasure women are allowed is in their children.”

“Belief doesn't rest on proof or existence...it rests on faith...without faith there is nothing.”

“I think explicit love scenes are a turn off unless it's the kind you read with one hand.”

“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.”

“Why shouldn't the living cords which lace our being together flick softly against a loved one in the very moment of their unraveling?...Sometimes, all the miles between are as nothing, sometimes, they are narrowed to the little silence between the beats of a heart.”

“I have discovered," he said to Charles Dewy, "that when a man marries, peace of mind and freedom go out of the window.""Well, old boy," said Charles comfortably, "that's the price we have to pay for having company in our old age and for ensuring that we have heirs to follow us.”

“The lovely thing about being forty is that you can appreciate twenty-five-year-old men more.”

“How frightening, that one person could mean so much, so many things.”

“He hadn't wooed her, but had simply claimed her. A gold mine ready to dig. There should have been a period of quiet dinners together, of flowers rather than diamonds, of kisses given after permission to kiss, of a slow awakening that predisposed her to greater intimacies. But no, not the great Alexander Kinross! He had met her, he had married her the next day, and climbed into her bed after one kiss in the church. There to prove himself an animal in her eyes. One mistake after another, that was the story of his relationship with Elizabeth. And Ruby had always meant more.”

“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.”

“There is no doubt that it is more difficult to read and more difficult to write but I still manage.”