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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

If intelligence is the triumph of life, the spoken word is the marvellous means by which this intelligence is manifested.

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.

I haven’t spoken to my wife in years. I didn’t want to interrupt her.

The job of a storyteller is to speak the truth. But what we feel most deeply can’t be spoken in words alone.

It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.

It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning.

I can’t have composite characters. I can’t attribute dialogue to someone based simply on my memory and not based on notes taken at the time that the words were spoken.

I talk to grown-ups who are out to have a good time and they want to be spoken to in a different way.