Barry Humphries

"There is no more terrible fate for a comedian than to be taken seriously."

"Although there were many who did the dirty on him in the envious world of letters, Stephen* never let any of them live rent-free in his brain."

"And so I set these things down before the onset of the first of a thousand small physical degradations as, in a still-distant suburb, Death strides whistling towards me."

"He would have been a handful in any society. He is a misfit and fully conscious of it. The punctilio of his old-world manners, the dandified scrupulosity of his Savile Row suits, are compelled by an unsleeping awareness that he has no more business among ordinary human beings than a Venusian."