Top 63 Quotes & Sayings by Barry Humphries
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Australian comedian Barry Humphries.
Last updated on September 18, 2024.
Peter Cook and Dudley Moore were friends and the last people I expected would predecease me. They were, in a sense, casualties of fame.
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.
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.
People only watch my shows for me, and those shows have remained evergreen long after the guests are forgotten.
Glamour comes from within. My beauty regime begins with my personality.
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.
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.
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.
To live in Australia permanently is rather like going to a party and dancing all night with one's mother.
I say things other people wish they could say. I don't pick on people - I empower them.
Sex is the most beautiful thing that can take place between a happily married man and his secretary.
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.
New Zealand is a country of thirty thousand million sheep, three million of whom think they are human.
What is extraordinary about the character of Edna - and I speak as though I am completely outside this character and I am talking to you - I'm, as it were, in the wings, and she's on stage, and every now and then she says something extremely funny, and I stand there and think: 'I wish I'd thought of that.'
I am writing a book called 'The History of Australia in Hundred Objects.' It's of things we have invented in Australia. And you know, some of them are amazing. We invented the clapper boards used in films. We invented those cranes - those big long cranes used on construction sites.
Political correctness means nothing to me. Nothing. It's the new Puritanism, darling. Preventing us from expressing ourselves.
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.
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 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.
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.'
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.
I've decided the secret of parenting is benevolent neglect.
There's to be a film about my life. I can give this as an exclusive now. Meryl Streep was offered the part but, no, I wanted Kate Winslet. Kylie Minogue is playing me in middle age. In old age, I'm not sure who's going to play me. I haven't got there yet. Perhaps Cate Blanchett. Or Jacki Weaver.
My parents were very pleased that I was in the army. The fact that I hated it somehow pleased them even more.
I've turned from an ordinary Australian housewife into a gigastar, icon, talk-show host, swami, spin doctor... and now I'm a style guru!
Most of my contemporaries at school entered the World of Business, the logical destiny of bores.
I've never looked at my Facebook page or my website, because I'm fundamentally an amateur.
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!
I have beautiful, beautiful clothes, designed by my bachelor boy son, Kenny. Kenny has a big following as it is, and even Lady Gaga has asked Kenny to design dresses for her. But Kenny isn't very keen on, well, shall we say, extreme women. He likes someone that women all over the world can identify with.
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 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'm approaching 70. Unfortunately, from the wrong direction.
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.
In Edna, I created a satiric portrait of my hometown of Melbourne, a large provincial English city paradoxically in far Southeast Asia. She's a theatrical figure, related to vaudeville in some respects. She inhabits a world in which there are comparatively few female exponents of comedy.
I suffer greatly from nerves. I have stage-fright badly, and it gets worse, but the stage is still my life.
I never thought that I would become a staple in the Australian cultural diet. The equivalent of bread or milk, or a fine old Tasmanian Mauve Vein. I think it's because I talk about things that people dare not mention. I don't mean raunchy things or unsavoury things. I call a spade a spade - I discuss things in a realistic manner.
I really feel sorry for kids who aren't interested in history - recent history, either, because it is this that made us what we are.
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.
One of the strangest experiences one can have is to sleep on stage, as I once did in Sydney when I'd lost the key to my flat. I had to stay at night in a bed, which conveniently was on stage because my character Sandy Stone did his monologue from a bed. To wake up looking at a shadowy auditorium is a very peculiar feeling.
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 know body hair bothers some women, but a lot of men like a fluffy partner.
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 love Australia - I think.
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.
I was born with a priceless gift, the ability to laugh at the misfortunes of others.
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.
I have outlived most of my more athletic contemporaries who jogged, golfed and squashed themselves into coronary occlusion.
Everyone had a Japanese maple, although after Pearl Harbor most of these were patriotically poisoned, ringbarked and extirpated.
I drift along, thinking about the past a great deal. The past is so reliable, so delightful, and the best place to live. I end up there quite often, you know; it's very comfortable and dependable.
Sport is a loathsome and dangerous pursuit.
The past is so reliable, so delightful and the best place to live.
Australia is an outdoor country. People only go inside to use the toilet. And that's only a recent development.
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
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.
The truth is deafening, no matter how softly it is spoken.
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.
Friendship is tested in the thick years of success rather than in the thin years of struggle.
He's very, very well-known. I'd say he's world-famous in Melbourne.
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.
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