Quotes from Barry Humphries

We all, to some extent, reinvent ourselves. Jeffrey (Archer) has just gone to a bit more trouble.

The best jokes are often only understood by one other person.

I love Australia - I think.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

New Zealand is a country of thirty thousand million sheep, three million of whom think they are human.

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!

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 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 really feel sorry for kids who aren't interested in history - recent history, either, because it is this that made us what we are.

He's very, very well-known. I'd say he's world-famous in Melbourne.

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.

I know body hair bothers some women, but a lot of men like a fluffy partner.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.