Top 80 Colleen McCullough Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “For the best is only bought at the cost of great pain.”

— Colleen McCullough

2. “Yet there’s something ominous about turning sixty-five. Suddenly old age is not a phenomenon which will occur; it has occurred.”

— Colleen McCullough

3. “There are no ambitions noble enough to justify breaking someone’s heart.”

— Colleen McCullough

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

— Colleen McCullough

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

— Colleen McCullough

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

— Colleen McCullough

7. “You say you love me, but you have no idea what love is; you’re just mouthing words you’ve memorized because you think they sound good!”

— Colleen McCullough

8. “No man sees himself in a mirror as he really is, nor any woman.”

— Colleen McCullough

9. “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.”

— Colleen McCullough

10. “When we press the thorn to our chest we know, we understand, and still we do it.”

— Colleen McCullough

11. “In The Touch, the love scenes are the same as they were in The Thorn Birds or anything else Ive 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.”

— Colleen McCullough

12. “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.”

— Colleen McCullough

13. “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.”

— Colleen McCullough

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

— Colleen McCullough

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

— Colleen McCullough

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

— Colleen McCullough

17. “Never forget, Caelius, that a great man makes his luck. Luck is there for everyone to seize. Most of us miss our chances; we’re blind to our luck. He never misses a chance because he’s never blind to the opportunity of the moment.”

— Colleen McCullough

18. “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.”

— Colleen McCullough

19. “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.”

— Colleen McCullough

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

— Colleen McCullough

21. “It’s no fun to be a bluestocking in a family of jockstraps.”

— Colleen McCullough

22. “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.”

— Colleen McCullough

23. “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.”

— Colleen McCullough

24. “I escaped the torture of my childhood home by reading. To this day it is still one of my greatest pleasures.”

— Colleen McCullough

25. “Until you can leave the matter of forgiveness to God, you will not have acquired true humility.”

— Colleen McCullough

26. “But we, when we put the thorns in our breasts, we know. We understand. And still we do it. Still we do it.”

— Colleen McCullough

27. “Rain, rain, rain. Like a benediction from some vast inscrutable hand, long withheld, finally given. The blessed, wonderful rain. For rain meant grass, and grass was life.”

— Colleen McCullough

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

— Colleen McCullough

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

— Colleen McCullough

30. “Meggie dropped to her knees, scrambling frantically to collect the miniature clothes before more damage was done them, then she began picking among the grass blades where she thought the pearls might have fallen. Her tears were blinding her, the grief in her heart new, for until now she had never owned anything worth grieving for.”

— Colleen McCullough

31. “You just hang onto the thought that every dog has its day, even the bitches.”

— Colleen McCullough

32. “The feeling of coming home, when she didn’t want to come home any more than she wanted the liability of love.”

— Colleen McCullough

33. “Living’s for those of us who failed. Greedy God, gathering in the good ones, leaving the world to the rest of us, to rot.”

— Colleen McCullough

34. “Truly God was good, to make man so blind.”

— Colleen McCullough

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

— Colleen McCullough

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

— Colleen McCullough

37. “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.”

— Colleen McCullough

38. “There was some justice in his pain.”

— Colleen McCullough

39. “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.”

— Colleen McCullough

40. “Oh, that feels good! I don’t know who invented ties and then insisted a man was only properly dressed when he wore one, but if I ever meet him, I’ll strangle him with his own invention.”

— Colleen McCullough

41. “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.”

— Colleen McCullough

42. “He had always been her baby, her lovely little boy; though she had watched him change and grow with proprietary pride, she had done so with an image of laughing baby superimposed on his maturing face.”

— Colleen McCullough

43. “The shock of having to pull herself up in the midst of a spontaneous reaction – I must remember to tell Dane about this, he’ll get such a kick out of it – that was what hurt the most. And because it kept on occurring so often, it prolonged the grief.”

— Colleen McCullough

44. “He owe his wife a debt he couldn’t hope to pay with any coin save one: open the cage and let the bird fly.”

— Colleen McCullough

45. “All that power held dormant, sleeping, only needing the detonation of a touch to trigger a chaos in which mind was subservient to passion, mind’s will extinguished in body’s will.”

— Colleen McCullough

46. “It’s Fortune,” he said. “I was given the hardest consulship a man has ever had. Just as I was given the hardest life a man has ever had. I’m not the kind to surrender, and I’m not the kind to care how I win. There are plenty of eggs in the cups and plenty of dolphins down. But the race won’t be over until I’m dead.”

— Colleen McCullough

47. “Surprised, she realized that keeping physically busy is the most effective blockade against totally mental activity human beings can erect.”

— Colleen McCullough

48. “It’s a dead give away of an inexperienced writer if every character speaks with the same voice.”

— Colleen McCullough

49. “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.”

— Colleen McCullough

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

— Colleen McCullough