* "A life without fame can be a good life, but fame without a life is no life at all."

* "Fiction is life with the dull bits left out."

* "All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light."

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

* "Common sense and a sense of humour are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing."

* On Arnold Schwarzenegger: "He has a body like a condom full of walnuts."

* On Beyonce at Glastonbury: "Beyonce and pathos are strangers. Amy Winehouse and pathos are flatmates, and you should see the kitchen."

* On Marilyn Monroe: "She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short"

* On Barbara Cartland: "Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff."

* On George W Bush: "Delivering the State of the Union? That bloke couldn't deliver pizza."

* On the News of the World phone-hacking scandal: "There is a difference between freedom of speech and the freedom to get a kick out of inflicting misery."

* On Princess Diana: "She wasn't just beautiful. She was like the sun coming up: coming up giggling. She was giggling as if she had just remembered something funny."

* On his birthplace: "Actually, like the vast majority of Australians, I had been born and raised in a city, but in the British imagination at that time the whole of Australia was still in the outback, which was somehow equipped with a beach. Later on, this outback beach acquired an Opera House and a row of brick bungalows, one of them occupied by Kylie Minogue."

* On TV: "Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world."

* On fame: "Fame comes to a point like a pimple. Every famous person, whether hugely, averagely or only slightly famous, has a moment when he suspects that he is as famous as he is ever going to get."

* On a memoir by soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev: "Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it. If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead."

* On Dan Brown's novel Inferno: "Every page you turn demonstrates his complete lack of talent as a writer. The rash of three dots that appear throughout the book give the impression that the narrative has measles."

* On the Sydney Opera House: "To me [the Opera House] looks like a portable typewriter full of oyster shells, and to the contention that it echoes the sails of yachts on the harbour I can only point out that the yachts on the harbour don't waste any time echoing the opera houses."

* On ageing: "I never feared growing old, because I was always very conscious that I was bad at being young."

* On death: "I'm getting near the end. I don't want to cast a gloom, an air of doom, over the program but I'm a man who is approaching his terminus."

* On dying: "If you don't know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do."

Australian Associated Press