Michael Leunig
Michael Leunig
Michael Leunig, typically referred to as Leunig, is an Australian cartoonist, poet and cultural commentator. His best known works include The Adventures of Vasco Pyjama and the Curly Flats series. He was declared an Australian Living Treasure by the National Trust of Australia in 1999...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionCartoonist
Date of Birth2 June 1945
CountryAustralia
Michael Leunig quotes about
driven ourselves power primal urges
The hypocrisy of some is that we like to think of ourselves as sophisticated and evolved, but we're still also driven by primal urges like greed and power.
christmas felt great streets wander
In my adolescence, I think I felt very outcast; I felt lonely. I felt great loneliness, and sometimes I wouldn't partake in Christmas, and I would go off and wander in the streets of Melbourne.
easter fails god
It is at Easter that Jesus is most human, and like all humans, he fails and is failed. His is not an all-powerful God, it is an all-vulnerable God.
artist express repressed society speak unspoken work
The work of the artist is to express what is repressed or even to speak the unspoken grief of society.
apologize art certainly hurts itself life nature offensive rude
Life itself is offensive and certainly does not apologize - in fact, it hurts considerably and, as we all know, is often very rude and troublesome, just as nature or art can be.
dad knows man smiling wise
When I was a boy, my own dad told me in a smiling and wistful way that it's a wise man that knows his own father.
childlike creature dreaming few hours human looks magical pitiful sleeping truthful
What a magical thing is the bed, and what a vulnerable, innocent creature is the sleeping human - the human who never looks more truthful or pitiful or benign; the curled-up, childlike dreaming soul who has for a few hours become an angel adrift.
best coming expressive primal rather work
The expressive body is not literal; it's very primal, and that's what I feel when I make the best of my work. It's coming from a primal place rather than an intellectual place.
great greatest moments music
There are moments when great music can be the greatest service and charity.
assimilate babies benign blissfully call complete feeling god held instead might moments perhaps poetic primal sensation
Perhaps the more benign and poetic sense of God is established when we are babies in the moments of primal joy we might call 'the epiphanies of infancy' - the sensation of being blissfully held and feeling complete and at one with everything - yet having no words or no need to say it but instead to just assimilate the feeling.
courts landed marks paper recall sorts
Over the years, my marks on paper have landed me in all sorts of courts and controversies - I have been comprehensively labelled; anti-this and anti-that, anti-social, anti-football, anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-Semitic, anti-science, anti-republican, anti-American, anti-Australian - to recall just an armful of the antis.
bishops bit nose ripe
Muftis and bishops should be like ripe camembert cheeses - a bit on the nose and not for the faint-hearted, but memorable!
absurd advocate einstein expressed good great ideas notion similar
Einstein was a great advocate of the notion that good ideas look absurd at the beginning. Camus expressed a similar view.