Australian Quotations

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

If 30 Australians drowned in Sydney Harbour, it would be a national tragedy. But when 30 or more refugees drown off the Australian coast, it is a political question.

That's what it's about, how society changes people but people can also change society. It only takes a few people to do things and help themselves instead of sitting around on their asses. She has a very global outlook on life and all sorts of things.

My memories of Australian cricket are it was an environment of good fun.

I've never been one to bow down to people who try to question my identity because I don't fit their mould of what an Aboriginal Australian is supposed to be or look like.

Technique is the basis of every pursuit. If you're a sportsman or you're a singer or a swimmer, well that comes under sport but you have to develop a basic technique to know what you're doing at any given time.

Any quality player can adjust well to the different demands. It is like a good tennis player who is expected to adjust to the clay at the French Open, the grass at Wimbledon, the hard courts of the U.S. and the heat of the Australian Open. A professional is expected to do all that.

When you meet someone for the first time, that's not the whole book. That's just the first page.

If you wait for inspiration you'll be standing on the corner after the parade is a mile down the street.

When I go to a film, you're taking it easy and you let things wash over you. That's what cinema's all about. You get involved in a world that's being created in front of you.

I'm not living for when I have a Number One record or when I make a million trillion dollars. I'm not doing this to get somewhere else. I'm doing it because I'm doing it.'

It is no secret that the Golf Foundation has had its difficulties.

An education system where student selection is based on credit capacity and not merit capacity and where graduating students are no longer indebted to the nation, but increasingly indebted to the Australian Taxation Office - that's no way to improve the quality of education.

Everyone has determination - it's a question of how you use it. Hers is based on power and success and conquering; she doesn't care what she has to do or who gets hurt in the process. In that way we're very, very different.

All I've ever wanted to do was play music and go on the road and make records.

You wait until the forest fire is on your front step before you step up.

I did not want to put myself on the line, as an Australian playing Britain's greatest comic actor. The fans of Sellers are obsessive, possessive - and aggressive. I did not want to risk their anger - or my own reputation.

The Australian people want to help build this country into a great nation. This budget... has not realized the capacity of the Australian people. It has underestimated them. It has let us down.

I'm in kind of a strange position - I have a strong Australian career and a strong British career. Then there's the American career. For every movie I do here, I do two somewhere else. I bounce back and forth between the three places.

I don't think I ever worked harder at any match during my career to get runs as I did then, nor did I ever have to face in one game such consistently fast bowlers as the Australian pair, Gregory and McDonald.

I'm quite proud of my piano playing. Robin's never played a note on the piano at our recording sessions. I just wish I could be appreciated musically now.

Dante didn't work out, and then we found Ryan. He worked at a comic, record and toy store in Fremont.

The hesitancy is in the detail, not the principal. There has been no resistance to the principal of women playing in the Open if they are qualified for it. We are not dragging our feet. It's just that we never had cause to think about it before.

A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down.

Songs don't just come out of the air. They take time, but it's good fun, too. Maurice gave me encouragement.

We were great mates. We didn't really go out together because we never really had the time to go out. But we were with each other all the time anyway because we were working all the time. We could sit down and talk for hours, and we still can. We just understood each other.

I guess to just keep playing music; to just keep outdoing the last record.

We loved Andy, so we wanted to keep him. He was in both bands, but Nerve Agents broke up.

The Australian fans are really friendly and personable; the sense of humour is a lot less dry than the English.

I didn't learn much about writing at Sarah Lawrence, but I learned a lot about the sources of poems - dreams, myth, history - from the really great teachers, Joseph Campbell, Charles Trinkhaus, Bert Loewenberg, and a young Australian anthropologist named Harry Hawthorne.

Because I like theatre and I love a challenge. With 'ZEBRA!' I've found a new Australian play where I can create a character first - that's what I live to do.

Everybody who knows us knows we always have a good time.

It's not important to how the band functions or to what we do. That's just many people's opinions on what they see. A lot of people project stuff on you, but that's okay.

Hollywood is the place to be for actors - and there's just a big rush when an Australian comes over just because there's less of them. I guess that's just how it is. Like if you pick a pink jellybean out of a jar of green ones it'd be amazing, but if you pick a green one, no one will care.

I have to take time occasionally to get away from the pressures of this business. If I don't, I think I would get stale, and that would show in my music.

It was like an older but better version of Young Talent Time because we had more time to spend on it. There were three guys and three girls and we made thirteen episodes that were sold in the United States and Canada.

Yidaki didgeridoo has been used in every part of Australian regional culture, all around the country. It's become a message stick for the survival of those people, for aboriginal people and aboriginal culture.

We are always going to be influenced by America... I watched the word 'bum' go out and 'butt' come in. And part of me says, oh that's a shame, but Aussie boys are still Aussie boys.

The only problem I have with American money is that it's all kind of the same color, so I'm always having to look. Whereas with Australian money, you have purple, blue, yellow... We keep it nice and simple.

I really wanted to work hard on my lyrics.

The secret to my success is that I bit off more than I could chew and chewed as fast as I could.

It's a song that we sing after we win a Test match. We sing it after every one-day series win. It's been passed down through the generations. It's the culture of the Australian team.

We also listen to PJ Harvey; a lot of driving music. You need something a little more relaxing in the car.

Australian seafarers make an important contribution to national security in a country with thousands of kilometres of uninhabited coastline.

As far as performance, the roar of the crowd, the smell of the greasepaint no I don't feel that.

I had a scene where the chair was meant to slide off the table, but do you think it would slide off? No. We were running out of time and we had to get these scenes done urgently.

America? They had a good girl singer, Janis Joplin.

We drink VB, Victoria Bitter, which is way better.

Expecting something for nothing is the most popular form of hope.

I just want to do something risque for my debut, purely because I didn't want to make an entrance being the pretty, sweet type that I've been seen as for the last 3 years.

I can't remember too much about the '80s, to be honest with you... I wish that weren't true, but it is.

You help families focus on the future through their children.

I always watched the show thinking, 'Wouldn't it be great to be a member?', but I never thought it would happen.

Success isn't a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.

I didn't expect to get it at all. I just went along to the audition for the experience.

The key to everything is patience. You get the chicken by hatching the egg, not by smashing it.

A lot of these people were getting to where they didn't need help anymore. You have to start all over again.

I stopped this one about two months before federation and I want the next one to be more political. It will deal with the formation of white Australian policy and things like that." ()

Finally, I found a program that's put my troubles behind me.

Our career path has tended to be the most perverse and contrary approach to the entertainment industry imaginable, while at the same time doing the kinds of things that you have to do, the videos, the photos and all that sort of stuff.

I knew at the time that that wasn't the part I would be doing, they just wanted a screentest so they could have a look at it to show to the directors and producers. Then they wrote a part for me or maybe they already had it in mind, I don't know.

I started ice-skating when I was about 12 or 13 and I was selected in the Australian team for ice hockey. I met my wife at St Moritz Ice Skating about 1955.

Although I'm Australian, I find myself much more in sympathy with the Austrian version!

Laughter is a tranquilizer with no side effects.

When people come to me and tell me I was terrific in this or that, I do not want to fall flat on my face the next time. But, tough, I have fallen flat before. You just get up and dust yourself off.

It was like a classic thing with Emma. So I walked in and I slammed the door and everything fell off the wall on the set. It was my second or third scene and I was so embarrassed and scared and so nervous about what everyone would say, but everyone just packed up laughing.

Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

I'm black and Cuban, Australian and Irish, and like most people in America, I'm someone whose roots come from somewhere else. I'm a mixed race, first-generation American.

They spend an awful lot of money on I-don't-know-what in Hollywood movies; I certainly didn't get any of it. But they sure do love spending money.

Jim Morrison's very good looking, but I don't like this version of the song. The Feliciano version is better.

If we are to celebrate the giants in Australian public life, then Robert Garran must be among them. A lawyer and passionate advocate of Federation, Garran was one of several hands that drafted our constitution.

They had asked for me because they wanted a younger girl, but Mum asked if she could bring Kylie along because she didn't want there to be any jealously.

For me, even just being English was a whole sort of experience in as much as I'm Australian.

It's their story, and I got to be the guy in the back while they were in the foreground.

My eye muscles hurt now when I read our MasterCard bill.

And I grew up watching all the British ones so when you hear that from an early age, it makes it much easier than you guys who don't grow up with Australian television or British television.

Robin hasn't got a big nose - but I can soon arrange that.

Barry seems to be more flamboyant merely because he gets more interviews to talk about it.

An idea not coupled with action will never get any bigger than the brain cell it occupied.

Tender Mercies is a very low-budget film, but it was a huge budget compared to anything I had done in Australia. My fee for Tender Mercies was something like five times all of my Australian films combined.

I do have a lot of Australian friends.

The fact is that we take music very seriously.

Live so that your friends can defend you but never have to.

As a card-carrying space nerd and NASA's chief scientist, I love space movies, from 'Star Trek' to 'Star Wars' to my all-time favorite - 'The Dish', an Australian comedy that celebrates that first moment when Neil Armstrong stepped down onto the surface of our moon.

It means that, in fact, it's - whether fascist is the right word I don't know - more of a plutocracy than anything resembling a democracy; it has become a nation controlled by a very small, very wealthy elite.

We'd have to suck away at oxygen canisters between songs just so that we could keep playing.

On YouTube you can tell what countries are watching and I've definitely noted a strong Australian following. You can plan your tours around where the love is on Twitter and YouTube - before, you couldn't tell.

I still listen to a lot of the classics from Bob Dylan and John Martin, but I love electronic music as well. I'm a big fan of an Australian DJ and producer called Flume, who I think is incredible. He should be more successful in the U.K.!

I'm a proud Australian, a very, very proud Australian.

It's rare that there's a role that requires an Australian accent.

All some folks want is their fair share and yours.

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.

You know, I'm Australian, and we have got the worst sense of humor. We are cruel to each other.

With the Australian Government paying more of the hospital bills, it will have the incentive to make sure people are treated through less expensive and more appropriate primary care services.

If the states and territories do not sign up to fundamental reform, then my message is equally simple: we will take this reform plan to the people at the next election - along with a referendum by or at that same election to give the Australian Government all the power it needs to reform the health system.

My fundamental interests are to preserve the good name and standing of this Australian Labor Party and to act in the national interest on behalf of the Australian Government.

It's an Australian thing to be dismissive. We find that endearing. Americans don't. They believe what you say.

My father was a headmaster in England and then the dean of a college in Australia. We moved there when I was about five, so my education was in Australia, and I always felt I was Australian even though my passport was British.

Well Australia's been in Afghanistan from the get go, way back in 2001, but we have been resolute throughout and with support from both sides of Australian politics.

The Australian tour was good for us; it was ideal preparation for us.