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

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.

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

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

I know body hair bothers some women, but a lot of men like a fluffy partner.

Just because a lot of people know something nominal doesn’t make it important. A lot of people know what a pencil sharpener is, but that doesn’t make it the most important invention of the 20th century.

The worst story I know is my heart. The best story I know is my heart. Both these truths know how to exist together in ways I never thought I will learn. This is the quietest of victories.

Yes, I’m going to be the President of the United States. You know why? You think you can get chicks by being in the movies? You can really get chicks by being the President.

I like acting for myself as a director. I act and I know that I’ll have a chance to have some say in what gets used and that I’ll be able to give myself enough takes and be on the same page as myself about how the scene should play.

I don’t know if a country (America) where the people are so ignorant of reality and of history, if you can call that a free world.

My movies are always being played on television, I’m very well known and all that stuff.

To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not–this is the beginning of writing.

I’m known for being an up, high-energy, and optimistic kind of guy.