Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was incredibly jealous of friends who had bit parts in 'Home and Away.' I just hoped I'd somehow be allowed into this game.
My daughter was two weeks old when I wrote 'White Wine in the Sun.' I can remember just sobbing and having to leave the room.
It's about the audience - if they laugh and clap, you feed off that, and if they don't, you doubt everything you've ever done.
These days, I'm a hypocritical, philosophical vegetarian. Vegetarianism would be the right choice, but I really, really love meat.
When I came into comedy in 2005, I didn't even know there was discrimination against musical comics in the alternative-comedy strain.
I had lunch with Andrew Lloyd Webber at the end of 2011 because my musical 'Matilda' is in one of the theatres that he owns in London.
In a global world, nationalism is a fantasy, and it's poison. It used to be appropriate, but it's not anymore, and we haven't learned that lesson yet.
I know people come to my shows expecting me to give voice to some of the frustrations that nice, happy, progressive people like me have with the world.
I have written a lot of musical theatre over my life - two Olivier Award-winning musicals - and I still don't think I'm ready to be the boss in the room.
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 was a late bloomer, but I realised that people really liked it when I played blues scales and, with the piano, I had that insatiable need to prove myself.
My granddad had a 1,500-acre hobby farm that he had built up from scratch in Western Australia, so my siblings and I spent our childhoods going there a lot.
I have these rhyme-based ideas because I love Julia Donaldson. 'The Snail and the Whale' is one of the most beautiful poems, and I feel like I could do that.
I was naive. Before 'Larrikins,' I thought passion, hard work, and a skill set will mean that anything you want to do will get done. I don't think that anymore.
I'm not a good philanthropist yet; I'm not as good as I'd like to be... I believe very hard in luck. It's all chance; therefore, any privilege you have is chaos.
Respect people with less power then you. I don’t care if you’re the most powerful cat in the room, I will judge you on how you treat the least powerful. So there.
If I had a religion, its deity would be Audysseus, the sound God, and He would be a vengeful god, dishing out eternal damnation to people with cheap stage monitors.
If anyone can show me ... that there is any reason - other than fear - to believe in any version of an afterlife, I'll give you my piano, one of my legs, and my wife.
My brother and I played music together, and we all liked to show off. But I wasn't a particularly musical kid. I did piano lessons and quit. I got kicked out of the choir.
Dad was known for his barbecues at weekends and bubble and squeak on Sundays. We'd all have to set the table and clear the table. We had our own seats, totally structured.
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 had terrible ear problems and asthma and allergies. I spent quite a bit of time in hospital up to the age of eight so was not - am still not - extraordinarily intelligent.
Every song in 'Groundhog Day' works to forward the story in a chronological, narrative sense, to illuminate the state of mind of the person singing it and comment on the world.
Hollywood seduces a person who's used to making theater, art, and having success on their own terms and then tries to squish them into a box and, eventually, throws the box out.
The point of privilege and the notion of mansplaining is that sometimes I definitely feel like I should shut up. That's it functioning. That's the notion of privilege functioning.
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.
I think there's something fundamentally wrong with thinking that there's a God who looks after you but kills everyone else. There's something, if not immoral, then gross, about it.
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.
When you become successful, half the population puts you on a pedestal, and half the population treats you with less respect than you would have got if you were collecting their bins.
I'm as strict as my parents - I have high expectations, too. I'd never ask the kids to do something outside their capabilities, but I'll encourage them not to be lazy and to try hard.
Comedy is often a short career because you get to a point where you are no longer a small thing punching up at targets; you are the big thing, and it's hard to write from that position.
Science is not a body of knowledge nor a system of belief; it is just a term which describes humankind’s incremental acquisition of understanding through observation. Science is awesome.
I often get references to 'slight' or whatever, and my weight's been a thing for me my whole life. I have to really, really work. I train six times a week to just be normal and not be fat.
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.
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.
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 wake up in the morning quite excited by the notion that I get to immediately have a meal. That's the thing that gets me out of bed - just the thought of having a poached egg, or even some granola.
I want to be here for my family. I want to make stuff in Australia. I want to take what I've learned and contribute it to the industry. I think there's a moral imperative to do so for people like me.
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 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.
Christopher Hitchens's autobiography, 'Hitch 22', is a poignant read and very interesting because I have a very poor knowledge of recent political history - or, for that matter, distant political history.
In terms of comedy, I never did five-minute sets or clubs or anything. I just started doing shows. Coming from that theater background, it never crossed my mind that I should start doing five-minute sets.
I've been atheist since I became aware of the term, but my material is not all about religion - not by a long shot - and when I do address the topic, it is to point out where religiosity meets discrimination.
I am not a redhead. I have never been and am still not. Well, just a little... but I was blond as a kid and then mousy brown. As I got older... it came up. I've got a lot of red in my hair, but I'm not a ginge.
London represents the idea that someone pulled away the set from my life and replaced it with another. 'Here is your new baby. Here is your new life. And now you do comedy.' Without being smug, it's the best fun.
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.
I just want people to hold themselves to account about what they think more, because I strongly believe that the way to live a moral life is to not allow yourself to have beliefs which are easy but which don't make sense.
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.
Isn’t this enough? Just this world? Just this beautiful, complex wonderfully unfathomable world? How does it so fail to hold our attention that we have to diminish it with the invention of cheap, man-made myths and monsters?
If we talk about 'Groundhog Day' as a humanistic text - we only have one life, and there's no punishment or reward afterwards - then the wisdom is, just be kind because that will make you happy and the people around you happy.