Quotes by Colleen McCullough

• I want to know what they look like, their height, and colouring, physique and speech pattens.
• 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.
• My husband says it is very good that I have very tiny feet, because they're easier to get in my mouth.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• The lovely thing about being forty is that you can appreciate twenty-five-year-old men more.
• There is no doubt that it is more difficult to read and more difficult to write but I still manage.
• There's a hell of a lot of horny people out there who are not being gratified in the way they should be.
• It's a dead give away of an inexperienced writer if every character speaks with the same voice.
• In early draft it never satisfied me, and that was when it clicked into place and it went so well as a diary.
• It's a woman's book but I think the men will read it too.
• I think explicit love scenes are a turn off unless it's the kind you read with one hand.
• 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.
• I have an editor in my head, that's why I can't read Harry Potter, because Rowling is such a lousy writer.
• 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.
• 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.