Barry Humphries Quotes

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

"I'm approaching 70. Unfortunately, from the wrong direction."

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

"I have got to the point in my life when a lot of people I know have died or are dying, so I realise that somewhere outside the pearly gates is a queue, shuffling nearer and nearer to the celestial box office."

"I've decided the secret of parenting is benevolent neglect."

"Political correctness means nothing to me. Nothing. It's the new Puritanism, darling. Preventing us from expressing ourselves."

"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."

"My husband passed away a long time ago, and of course a lot of people have courted me. I've been taken to dinner and also to things like Larry Hagman, in particular years ago. And more recently, of course, little Hugh Jackman - and he's too young for me though, frankly."

"Glamour comes from within. My beauty regime begins with my personality."

"I suffer greatly from nerves. I have stage-fright badly, and it gets worse, but the stage is still my life."

"I feel like I've cheated. I never knew what to do. I was never a good enough painter to earn a living, and so I drifted into the theatre, and I've had a successful life. I feel guilty that I've never done a day's work in my life!"

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

"In Australia, they really want to turn me into a religion. A religion! Can you imagine? The Church of Edna? Oh. I don't want to be over-revered."

"Madonna is a creation, so perhaps we should give her and the factory that created her a little credit, but I think that she should quietly disappear now. Poor Madge seems unable to decide whether she wants to look like Marilyn Monroe or Marlene Dietrich."

"Peter Cook and Dudley Moore were friends and the last people I expected would predecease me. They were, in a sense, casualties of fame."

"When people laugh at me, they are not laughing in the way that they normally would at a comedian. They are laughing with relief, because the truth has been spoken, and political correctness has not strangled this particular gigastar."

"I say things other people wish they could say. I don't pick on people - I empower them."

"Those women with collagen lips just look like frogs - 'muffin mouths,' I call them. There's not a line on their brows, and all the emotion gone from their faces, like all those actresses in 'Desperate Housewives.'"

"Am I old-fashioned? I think I might be. I am a lucky woman, because I was born with a priceless gift... the ability to laugh at the misfortunes of others."

"I Sellotape whole tins of sardines to my face at night, attach two squeezed lemon rinds to my armadillo-skinned elbows, and put cucumber on my eyes. By the time I'm finished, I look like a fruit salad with added fish. In the morning, the pillow is pretty much a write-off."

"I've played Beckett. I put on in the 1950s the first Australian production of 'Waiting for Godot.' I played Estragon. The most interesting conversation I've had about Beckett was with a Dublin taxi driver."

"I hate it when theater people go on about professionalism - aren't they boring? I try to be as unprofessional as possible. And I'm a little bit politically incorrect."

"Oddly enough, Dame Edna is not interested in show business. Her friends in Los Angeles are mostly in the world of petroleum. She used to have some acting friends. Sadly, Joan Rivers has passed on. Larry Hagman was a close friend. A number of others."

"People only watch my shows for me, and those shows have remained evergreen long after the guests are forgotten."

"I denied this for many, many years and years... but you cannot help but not see a little of my mother in the character of Edna."

"Now the point of comedy is not just looking funny, it's use of language. We have at our disposal a great language... and the imaginative, creative use of that language can be at the service of humour."

"I guess you could say I'm an addict - an adrenalin addict - I get great excitement and stimulation from doing stuff in public, even though I'm nervous and I have very bad stage fright."

"I think of myself as an actor. The duty of an actor is to be able to impersonate anything - a child, an old man, a tree, a chair, a woman."

"I have charity work that I do. I started my own charity, the Friends of the Prostate, and I'm also working on awareness of the deviated septum. I do this because not many people are interested in it. There's also Save the Funnel-web - they're dying out."