“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.”
'Approximately in the Vicinity of Barry Humphries'
Essays and reviews, Snakecharmers in Texas (1988)
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Clive James 151
Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator an… 1939–2019Related quotes

A Letter from Cuba (1934)
Context: The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.

“A writer writes what he knows, in ways that are natural to him.”
Source: Shifu: You'll Do Anything for a Laugh and Other Stories

Olie Kolzig, interview in The Capital staff (March 6, 2008) "March is meaningful for Ovechkin, Capitals", The Capital, Capital-Gazette Newspapers, p. C5.
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“I have decided that maybe I want to write when I grow up. I just don't know what I would write.”
Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 543.