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.