Quotes from Tim Minchin

If you make a good show, you tend to get good reviews. I don't believe it is as arbitrary as some people tend to think, which artists do to protect themselves against bad reviews.

What I've created comedically owes a lot to my ignorance of comedy and love of making theatre stuff.

I don't want my work or me, as a person, to be held up as a paradigm because, as Richard Dawkins knows, if people hold you up too much, you're only ever going to disappoint them by being a human.

Mum and Dad had high expectations of us as human beings - it wasn't just about education. It's a fantastic way to go about parenting, and I aspire to that.

I think it's great that these little various skills I have seem to add up to something, because I'm not the greatest pianist or the greatest vocalist or the greatest actor.

I lived at home while attending the University of Western Australia in Perth, while doing a gap year and - partly - while attending the Academy of Performing Arts on the other side of town.

Generally, there's a correlation between good work and good reviews. In the very odd, very rare case that they say it's terrible, but actually you're a genius who is ahead of your time, you are going to just have to suffer.

It was - I'm very didactic in my lyrics, but I've always been drawn to mock my own emotions, and so I write this very lyric-heavy stuff, which suits theater and comedy much more than it suits pop.

I had written six scores by the time I was 20, and I'd never been paid a dollar.

I can make rhymes. My style of writing is kind of childlike anyway.

I'm the son of a surgeon and the grandson of a surgeon.

I never watch television, although, the other night, my wife and I caught an episode of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' from Season Six. It's the only series of which I've ever watched every single episode.

I can wax boringly about the role of comedy in mitigating pain. For so many comedians, comedy comes out of personal despair. I'm not a very despairing person myself, but I do fear despair and the death of loved ones.

That's the incredible thing about 'Matilda': it keeps manifesting itself in different ways.

Comedy actually works best when you're living in an OK world, and you are pointing out the hypocrisy in apathy.

That's the great part about arts - someone taking your work and making it something else; it's becomes a true collaboration.

I'm a comedian because I want people to like me. That's really why all comedians are comedians.

There's a lot of great, talented, passionate musical theatre practitioners and directors here. But it's very hard to suddenly start building great musicals in a town like Sydney where there hasn't been any great musicals built.

Because I'm on my own on stage and wear bare feet and look like a pixie, people always think I'm little.

I spent thousands of thousands of hours playing the piano, and by thousands of hours, I mean playing in cover bands or wedding bands or disco bands or original bands or playing cabaret for Todd McKenney.

I just always thought 'Groundhog Day' was potentially a great idea.

I started writing songs for youth theater and stuff, and so it's really writing music for the stage that started me out, but then I eventually went to music college and did a two-year course in contemporary music and then just played in endless bands, cover bands, jazz bands.

I don't like courting controversy because I don't like people not liking me.

I've stopped asking for criticism, even from friends, because I don't think anyone knows my little world of mega-thorough critical thinking/musical comic rambling better than I do.