Colleen McCullough Quotes

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

There are no ambitions noble enough to justify breaking someone's heart.

There's a story... a legend, about a bird that sings just once in its life. From the moment it leaves its nest, it searches for a thorn tree... and never rests until it's found one. And then it sings... more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. And singing, it impales itself on the longest, sharpest thorn. But, as it dies, it rises above its own agony, to outsing the lark and the nightingale. The thorn bird pays its life for just one song, but the whole world stills to listen, and God in his heaven smiles.

Each of us has something within us which won't be denied, even if it makes us scream aloud to die. We are what we are, that's all. Like the old Celtic legend of the bird with the thorn in its breast, singing its heart out and dying. Because it has to, its self-knowledge can't affect or change the outcome, can it? Everyone singing his own little song, convinced it's the most wonderful song the world has ever heard. Don't you see? We create our own thorns, and never stop to count the cost. All we can do is suffer the pain, and tell ourselves it was well worth it.

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.

I hate being on my best behavior. It brings out the absolute worst in me.

Perfection, in anything, is unbearably dull. Myself, I prefer a touch of imperfection.

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

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

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

Love and hate are cruel, only liking is kind

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

That's the purpose of old age... To give us a breathing space before we die, in which to see why we did what we did.

Old age is an ordeal, of flesh and mind. Of winding down, of slowing down, of dying cells. It's accepting the loss of physical attractiveness and replacing it with the power and wisdom that can only come with old age.

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

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

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.

What was sleep? A blessing, a respite from life, an echo of death, a demanding nuisance?

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.

Best of all she liked his eyes, such a translucent golden brown, and so laughing.

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

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

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.

duty, the most indecent of all obsessions, was only another name for love.

... the most insoluble problems are those which by their very nature can have no space within them for dreams.