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

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.

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

My husband is someone who's in the real world. It's a big help that I don't have both feet in Hollywood.

I think God made a woman to be strong and not to be trampled under the feet of men. I've always felt this way because my mother was a very strong woman, without a husband.

I think college is something I want to experience just to have the experience, really. I think about going to college all the time.

There are a lot of mindless moments in my tunes.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

I don't believe in honors - it bothers me. Honors bother: honors is epaulettes; honors is uniforms. My papa brought me up this way.

History is replete with ideologies of freedom, justice, liberation of the downtrodden and the exploited, that have been turned against the very people they had mobilised, or that have reproduced the same logic of exclusion and terror toward those whom they claimed to set free.

I was always a huge fan of E. E. Cummings. He did a series of lectures at Harvard or Princeton, and they were recorded. And they were incredibly moving.

Whatever your situation, God wants to heal you, strengthen you, and lead you to a place where you can enjoy life again.

When I was 13 I asked my mother if it was possible for this to end - I'd had enough of it. And that was right about the time that we got a call for 'The Exorcist' interview.

At the premieres, I always watch the audience. If a child asks to go to the bathroom, I know I've failed.

Whenever there was a choice between music and anything else, music won hands down every time.

If your ship doesn't come in, swim out to it.

We can all be conned but at what point do we realize that we're being conned and to what point do we allow ourselves to be conned?

It was my very good fortune to find a mentor, Clay Felker, who started my career at the 'New York Magazine' as a freelance writer when I had to quit my job at the 'Herald Tribune' to stay home with my young daughter.

We need to have our conservative version of what health care looks like, and that will include a repeal of Obamacare.

No one expected me to become a champion.

Chicago always hit me as such a gloomy place - I just remember all the snow getting dirty as soon as it would fall, all the decaying brown brick buildings around where we lived, all this soot all over the place.

As we realise that more and more things have global impact, I think we're going to get people increasingly wanting to get away from a purely national interest.

Cooking is like love. You don't have to be particularly beautiful or very glamorous, or even very exciting to fall in love. You just have to be interested in it. It's the same thing with food.

Army Specialist Bradley Manning deserves a medal, not prison.

I have always struggled to achieve excellence. One thing that cycling has taught me is that if you can achieve something without a struggle it's not going to be satisfying.

Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.

If only you could sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.

You'd be surprised how many times I've had to have that conversation with heads of state who want to say to me, 'Well, look, I know you can have some influence on the president. I need you to go back and tell him this.'

I write and rewrite and rewrite and write and like to turn in what I think is finished work.