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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 woman's book but I think the men will read it too.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

I indeed had only one scene, one speech, one little speech, but it was with Robin Williams.

A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.

Native Americans are the original inhabitants of the land that now constitutes the United States. They have helped develop the fundamental principles of freedom of speech and separation of powers that form the foundation of the United States Government.

The most censored speech in America today is not flag-burning, pornography, or the press.

One camp accepts the Court's limits on contributions but urges the reinstatement of spending caps - even if this requires a constitutional amendment subjecting political speech, if not pornography, to government regulation.

If a university official's letter accusing a speaker of having a proclivity to commit speech crimes before she's given the speech - which then leads to Facebook postings demanding that Ann Coulter be hurt, a massive riot and a police-ordered cancellation of the speech - is not hate speech, then there is no such thing as hate speech.

A hypocrite is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation.

A very considerable body of the German people live in America and propose to fight that Government. Bourke in his great speech last week welcoming the Belgian mission to Boston worked out the President's meaning with care.

No one ever complains about a speech being too short!

Never forget posterity when devising a policy. Never think of posterity when making a speech.

But please know, whether you believe campaign contributions are speech or property, that I learned to love very dearly the right of free expression when I lived without that freedom for a while a long time ago.

I mean there's enormous pressures to harmonize freedom of speech legislation and transparency legislation around the world - within the E.U., between China and the United States. Which way is it going to go? It's hard to see.

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.

Literature is the immortality of speech.

My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.

A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.

Israel is a country that respects freedom - freedom of assembly, freedom of speech and freedom of worship.

The most precious things in speech are pauses.

Much speech is one thing, well-timed speech is another.

Great ambition, the desire of real superiority, of leading and directing, seems to be altogether peculiar to man, and speech is the great instrument of ambition.

Speeches are not magic and there is no great speech without great policy.

Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself, it provokes me forever, it says sarcastically, Walt you contain enough, why don't you let it out then?

It just seems to be a human trait to want to protect the speech of people with whom we agree. For the First Amendment, that is not good enough. So it is really important that we protect First Amendment rights of people no matter what side of the line they are on.

Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects.

In rendering its decision in our case, the Supreme Court equated money with speech because these days it takes the first to make yourself heard.

While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.

It's good that the first half of the speech emphasized freedom, because George W. Bush has been the global champion for freedom. As he said, if we don't fight tyranny it will not leave us alone in peace.

All speech is vain and empty unless it be accompanied by action.

Monkeys who very sensibly refrain from speech, lest they should be set to earn their livings.

Because of my language and the pantomime with which most Europeans accompany their speech, I was catalogued as a heavy.