“In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.”

I’m fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.

Secret codes resound. Doubts and intentions come to light.

Any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.

God was finally going to believe in a man both good and strong, but good and strong are still two different men.

My choices are rejections, since there is no other way, but what I reject is more numerous, denser, more demanding than before. A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable losses.

Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious; they don’t like to joke.

Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice.

I’m one-time-only to the marrow of my bones.

Even boredom should be described with gusto. How many things are happening on a day when nothing happens?

They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one’s behind me, anyway.

Nothing’s a gift, it’s all on loan.

I am who I am. A coincidence no less unthinkable than any other.

The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.

Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.

Sometimes I write quickly, sometimes I spend several weeks on a single poem. I would really love for readers not to be able to guess which of the poems took so much work!

No one in my family has ever died of love. What happened, happened, but nothing myth-inspiring.

When I first did theatre, I was always doing comedies; it was always my first love. But it wasn’t what I was picked for at first, for films and TV.

Action comedy, if you can get it right, it is, for me, a particularly brilliant genre. It really is.

When I do comedy, I lose all inhibition and introspection. I no longer care.

People who know me , they know I have a sense of humor, I’m a bit of a joker, a bit of a clown really, and I would love someone to exploit that side of me and send me a romantic comedy.

Doing drama is, in a sense, easier. In doing comedy, if you don’t get that laugh, there’s something wrong.

I don’t think Hollywood knows what to do with me. I would imagine that when it comes to romantic comedies, my name would be pretty low down on the list.

Every student of comedy should see Dame Edna at least twice.

Anyone can write. But comedy, you’ve got to do some writing. You get one comedy script to every 20 dramas.