Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I love Australia - I think.
Sport is a loathsome and dangerous pursuit.
The truth is deafening, no matter how softly it is spoken.
I've decided the secret of parenting is benevolent neglect.
I'm approaching 70. Unfortunately, from the wrong direction.
The past is so reliable, so delightful and the best place to live.
He's very, very well-known. I'd say he's world-famous in Melbourne.
If you have to explain satire to someone, you might as well give up.
Glamour comes from within. My beauty regime begins with my personality.
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.
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.
I say things other people wish they could say. I don't pick on people - I empower them.
I've never looked at my Facebook page or my website, because I'm fundamentally an amateur.
Friendship is tested in the thick years of success rather than in the thin years of struggle.
Most of my contemporaries at school entered the World of Business, the logical destiny of bores.
Sex is the most beautiful thing that can take place between a happily married man and his secretary.
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.
To live in Australia permanently is rather like going to a party and dancing all night with one's mother.
I like people who are slightly unhygienic. A little grubbiness isn't so bad. BO chic it should be called.
I suffer greatly from nerves. I have stage-fright badly, and it gets worse, but the stage is still my life.
My parents were very pleased that I was in the army. The fact that I hated it somehow pleased them even more.
Australia is an outdoor country. People only go inside to use the toilet. And that's only a recent development.
People only watch my shows for me, and those shows have remained evergreen long after the guests are forgotten.
I have outlived most of my more athletic contemporaries who jogged, golfed and squashed themselves into coronary occlusion.
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.
Political correctness means nothing to me. Nothing. It's the new Puritanism, darling. Preventing us from expressing ourselves.
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.
Everyone had a Japanese maple, although after Pearl Harbor most of these were patriotically poisoned, ringbarked and extirpated.
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.
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.
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've turned from an ordinary Australian housewife into a gigastar, icon, talk-show host, swami, spin doctor... and now I'm a style guru!
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.
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
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.
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 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 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'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.
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.
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'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 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.
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.'
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!
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.
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.