Colleen McCullough
Colleen McCullough
Colleen Margaretta McCullough AOwas an Australian author known for her novels, her most well-known being The Thorn Birds...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth1 June 1937
CountryAustralia
experience journey lived personal time
I lived in the US for donkeys' years so it has been a journey back in time for me. If you have had personal experience of something, it is always more authentic." ()
ahead fun patterns speech
They should all have their own speech patterns with their own tics and little foibles. It's fun working all that out ahead of time." ()
great refuse repeat
They (the publishers) would be ecstatic, I just refuse to. You can't repeat a great act." ()
appreciate forty lovely men year
The lovely thing about being forty is that you can appreciate twenty-five- year old men more" ()
depth means
It means I don't have much depth of vision," ()
character teeth bits
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
song agony bird
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.
birthday appreciation women
The lovely thing about being forty is that you can appreciate twenty-five-year-old men more.
character two research
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.
song pain heart
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.
breathing space giving
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.
sleep blessing echoes
What was sleep? A blessing, a respite from life, an echo of death, a demanding nuisance?
women reading home
I escaped the torture of my childhood home by reading. To this day it is still one of my greatest pleasures.
determination memories healing
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.