Barry Humphries Quotes

I love Australia - I think.

Sport is a loathsome and dangerous pursuit.

If you have to explain satire to someone, you might as well give up.

To live in Australia permanently is rather like going to a party and dancing all night with one's mother.

He's very, very well-known. I'd say he's world-famous in Melbourne.

Sex is the most beautiful thing that can take place between a happily married man and his secretary.

I like people who are slightly unhygienic. A little grubbiness isn't so bad. BO chic it should be called.

The whole point of art, aside from the aesthetic pleasure it yields, is that it provides a bridge to the past; that seductive land where we all find certainty and consolation. Nothing quite spans this gulf with such immediacy as the art of popular song.

Australia is an outdoor country. People only go inside to use the toilet. And that's only a recent development.

I'm an immensely shy and vulnerable woman. My husband has never seen me naked. Nor has he expressed the least desire to do so.

I have outlived most of my more athletic contemporaries who jogged, golfed and squashed themselves into coronary occlusion.

I think a lot of people think that we [comedians] are nerveless people in the theatre, that we don't feel that kind of terror which traditionally anyone who has to do any public speaking feels. It's worse for actors, because our livelihood depends on it.

Everyone had a Japanese maple, although after Pearl Harbor most of these were patriotically poisoned, ringbarked and extirpated.

I was born with a priceless gift, the ability to laugh at the misfortunes of others.

It's an old Aboriginal word meaning 'Let's get together and have fun'. They gave us the word because they had no further need for it.

New Zealand is a country of thirty thousand million sheep, three million of whom think they are human.

The truth is deafening, no matter how softly it is spoken.

I've decided the secret of parenting is benevolent neglect.I put my family last. Because if you don't, if you put them first, they never thank you. You'll never get a word of thanks from them.

There is no more terrible fate for a comedian than to be taken seriously.

Friendship is tested in the thick years of success rather than in the thin years of struggle.

The past is so reliable, so delightful and the best place to live.

I drift along, thinking about the past a great deal. The past is so reliable, so delightful, and the best place to live. I end up there quite often, you know; it's very comfortable and dependable.

Never be afraid to laugh at yourself, after all, you could be missing out on the joke of the century.

My parents were very pleased that I was in the army. The fact that I hated it somehow pleased them even more.

If you can't laugh at yourself, you may be missing the colossal joke of the century.

My mother used to say that there are no strangers, only friends you haven't met yet. She's now in a maximum security twilight home in Australia

Most of my contemporaries at school entered the World of Business, the logical destiny of bores.