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.

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.

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

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.

Later on after the war was over the women were to find this constantly; the men who had actually been in the thick of battle never opened their mouths about it, refused to join the ex-soldiers’ clubs and leagues, wanted nothing to do with institutions perpetuating the memory of war.

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.

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!

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

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.

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.