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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Sport is a loathsome and dangerous pursuit.

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

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

I love Australia – I think.

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

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.

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

I knew everything in the forest. I had a secret home tree, where I pretty much lived. I also liked rooftops and streetlamps. My parents would get calls saying ‘He’s out there again.’

And my parents made me want i am. So what? We get stuff from our parents, but we also get stuff from the world around us. From people around us. And at the end of the day, we’re us.

When I was working a lot, I felt guilty as a parent. I couldn’t pick up my son every day from school, bake him cookies and that kind of thing.

All love – love of children, love of parents, love of God or life – comes out of making physical love. Without the making of love there is no body to love anything.

Nurses nurse and teachers teach and tailors mend and preachers preach and barbers trim and chauffeurs haul and parents get to do it all.

Hip Hop has introduced us to a lot of genres that we probably wouldn’t even listen to in our own homes from our parents.

There is one thing you and I as parents cannot do, not do we want to do if we really think about it, and that’s control our children’s will–that spirit that lets them be themselves apart from you and me. They are not ours to possess, control, manipulate, or even to make mind.

Google is one of the most incredible breakthroughs that we have today. Yes, it can scare a lot of patients, thinking we’re all dying because we look up something on Google. But there’s also a lot of anecdotal information from parents, firsthand accounts of what they did for their own child.