One of [Mann's] many reasons for hating the Third Reich was that it forced him to be a better man than he really was. - Clive James

A painter can leave you with nothing left to say. A writer leaves you with everything to say.

I was born in 1939. The other big event of that year was the outbreak of the Second World War, but for the moment that did not affect me.

When Humphries writes in propria persona his prose can scarcely contain its freight of cultivated allusions. He writes the most nutritiously rococo English in Australia today, but nobody will be able to inherit it. To know him would not be enough. You would have to know what he knows.