Quotes by Australian/Australia authors (page 2)

"Most people remember me for a couple of tunes"

Colin Hay, Musician

"It is better to be defeated on principle than to win on lies"

Arthur Calwell, Politician

"'Promiscuous' implies that I'm not choosy. In fact I'm very choosy. I just happen to have had a lot of choices"

Jackie Weaver, Actress

"The Internet provides a delivery system for pathological states of mind"

Phillip Adams, Writer

"What career? A man's got a body of film of about four movies in about 10 years or something. I do it because I think I can do a good job of something and I'll enjoy it, do it, and sort of vanish. I don't want to be an actor for hire"

Paul Hogan, Actor

"Aspiring to a souffle, he achieves a pancake at which the reader saws without much appetite"

John Leonard, Poet

"I never buy magazines, I never even buy books"

Marc Newson, Designer

"I'm living by example by continuing on with my career and having a full, rich life, and I am incidentally gay"

Portia de Rossi, Actress

"I have a wife and a son, but the gay rumors have started. I guess it's a sign that I'm moving up the ladder"

Hugh Jackman, Actor

"They've said I'm gay, they've said everyone is gay. I personally don't believe in doing huge lawsuits about that stuff. Tom does. That's what he wants to do, that's what he's going to do. You do not tell Tom what to do. He is a force to be reckoned with"

Nicole Kidman, Actress

"I think back and marvel that my ambitions were so small"

Helen Reddy, Actress

"It's very hard to step into a job when people are just dismissing you as a pretty face, and saying you got your job only because your surname is McMahon"

Julian McMahon, Actor

"I was just absolutely exhausted. The media said I've been treated for a nervous breakdown. All that stuff I just took as people taking the opportunity when you're down to give you a kick"

John Hewson, Politician

"In the last twelve years, we have come some distance towards reconciliation and the breaking down of disadvantage. Let us take encouragement from what has been achieved and set our minds and hearts to end the remaining roadblocks"

Malcolm Fraser, Politician

"God bless America. God save the Queen. God defend New Zealand and thank Christ for Australia"

Russell Crowe, Actor

"I think it is just stupid economics for a government to approach economic management from a strand of thinking regarding unions as enemies"

Bob Hawke, Statesman

"In my right-wing politics of the time, I held that unemployment was usually the fault of the unemployed"

Luke Ford, Writer

"We never considered ourselves to be a good band or anything, we just thought we were playing for fun and we wanted to play music that sounded like Black Sabbath or Soundgarden or the music we were into at that time"

Daniel Johns, Musician

"It is a matter of public shame that while we have now commemorated our hundredth anniversary, not one in every ten children attending Public schools throughout the colonies is acquainted with a single historical fact about Australia"

Henry Lawson, Writer

"I like poking my nose into other people's lives"

Helen Garner, Novelist

"I say further that our system of education should be unsectarian"

Edmund Barton, Politician

"I had learned what wealth was, and a great deal about production and exchange for myself in the early history of South Australia - of the value of machinery, of roads and bridges, and of ports for transport and export"

Catherine Helen Spence, Author

"Victoria was just as much in love with me as I was with her. We could not bear to be apart for a single second. We were like two lovers shipwrecked on a desert island. There was no world outside our love"

Andy Gibb, Musician

"You've got to stick at a thing, a particular thing, until you succeed.I feel that's the only way to succeed - by concentrating on something in particular. Once you know what you've got to do you will succeed, you will succeed"

Betty Cuthbert, Athlete

"Now it is evident that a little insight into the customs of every people is necessary to insure a kindly communication; this, joined with patience and kindness, will seldom fail with the natives of the interior"

Charles Sturt, Explorer

"Fiction is life with the dull bits left out"

Clive James, Author

"Whoever called snooker 'chess with balls' was rude, but right"

Clive James, Author

"A life without fame can be a good life, but fame without a life is no life at all"

Clive James, Author

"She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short"

Clive James, Author

"Disco dancing is just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail"

Clive James, Author

"Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world"

Clive James, Author

"Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire"

Clive James, Author

"Um, what I found though about the Christian Brothers is this: that they were certainly muscular"

Thomas Keneally, Novelist

"I thought I'd definitely be a writer, whatever I did"

Thomas Keneally, Novelist

"Australia integrated the - brought on the ships and unleashed in the society the dogs of sectarianism, which had existed in other places - in Glasgow, in Liverpool and of course in Ireland, north and south"

Thomas Keneally, Novelist

"And I liked pluralist Australia. I got a taste for pluralist Australia. I like, I like Australians and I can't believe that they're going to go to hell because they tell a good dirty joke, you know"

Thomas Keneally, Novelist

"I must apologise because I know all writers have memories of being on the outer because it's the children on the side of the playground who become the dangerous writers"

Thomas Keneally, Novelist

"The principle of the brotherhood of man is narcissistic... for the grounds for that love have always been the assumption that we ought to realize that we are the same the whole world over"

Germaine Greer, Activist

"Revolution is the festival of the oppressed"

Germaine Greer, Activist

"Perhaps catastrophe is the natural human environment, and even though we spend a good deal of energy trying to get away from it, we are programmed for survival amid catastrophe"

Germaine Greer, Activist

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Quotes by Australian authors