COLLEEN MCCULLOUGH

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

My husband says it is very good that I have very tiny feet, because they're easier to get in my mouth.

..the best is only bought at the cost of great pain...or so says the legend

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.

My books and other works are my legacy, and it's a great comfort to know that mine is a legacy of pleasure for other people.

There was some justice in his pain

We're working-class people, which means we don't get rich or have maids. Be content with what you are and what you have.

The bird with the thorn in its breast, it follows an immutable law; it is driven by it knows not what to impale itself, and die singing. At the very instant the thorn enters there is no awareness in it of the dying to come; it simply sings and sings until there is not the life left to utter another note. But we, when we put the thorns in our breasts, we know. We understand. And still we do it. Still we do it.

If you love people, they kill you. If you need people, they kill you. They do I tell you!

It's no fun to be a bluestocking in a family of jockstraps.