Colleen McCullough

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

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. ”

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. ”

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

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

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

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. ”

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. ”