Clyde Packer Quotes

101 Clyde Packer Quotes

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[In November 1984.] The thing about tycoonery - and I’m not attacking Kerry because his family life is most important to him - but the more a person gets involved in being a tycoon, it chews up so much of him there is less of the real person left. Being a tycoon is not a real thing. We’re all expendable, all fallible, but tycoons believe they’re not - or maybe they worry that they are.
Clyde Packer

[In November 1984.] I went overboard a bit ... I wanted all the sweets in the shop at once. The '60s hit me about five years later than everyone else.
Clyde Packer

When I quit, my resignation was accepted with great alacrity. I suspect my father was as glad to get rid of me as I was to get rid of him.
Clyde Packer

I know exactly what I don't want to do. That doesn't mean I know what I want to do.
Clyde Packer

[In November 1984 on being asked once to write his own book about the Packer family.] I’ll never write the real Packer story. It would hurt too many people.
Clyde Packer

[In 1984.] Notwithstanding the impression given in the Australian press that the universe rotates around Australia, most people outside the major urban centres in America would have difficulty (despite Brian Brown, Mel Gibson and Helen Morse) picking out Australia in an atlas. Many are still pleasantly surprised to discover that Australians speak English. Yet Australians are to be found everywhere in America.
Clyde Packer

[In 1984.] English Australians are a different type of animal…
Clyde Packer

[In 1984.] Too many Australian’s who live out their days in England treat their nationality as a sort of social disease, which if assiduously treated can eventually be cured but if left untreated invariably becomes terminal…
Clyde Packer

[In 1984 on why he chose ‘No Return Ticket’ as the title for his book.] It seemed to deal neatly with the various means of changing countries. A one-way ticket usually means a permanent arrival in a new country. Some people leave Australia on a one-way ticket; theirs are deliberate, permanent departures. Others leave with a round-trip ticket and just do not return. Sooner or later they cash the ticket in. This cashing of the ticket is often the cutting of the last firm link with home. It implies a commitment to a new life outside Austrlaia.
Clyde Packer

[In 1984.] A so-called ‘expatriate’ myself, I often wonder whether satellite communications and jumbo jets have tempered the traditional perception of expatriates as being people who have turned their back on their country. The feeling of separation that moving to a new country used to involve has been almost eliminated by the variety of modern communications now available.
Clyde Packer



[In 1984.] The international telephone, the cost of which seems to fall as its quality and ease of use rises, is a unique pipeline for family members separated by an ocean actually to hear each other’s voices a few times a year. But if expats buy package trips home to Australia regularly and ring up Mum once a month, are they still expats? Not according to my dictionary.
Clyde Packer

[In 1984.] The physical distance between Australia and America, is not what it used to be.
Clyde Packer

[In 1984.] I might have used ‘expatriate’… but… any reality associated with the expression has long vanished. ‘Expatriate’ English writers now huddle in their villas in Switzerland or Nice to avoid taxation rather than from any sense of alienation from their native land, jetting home for the twelve weeks in each year they can spend in London without attracting English tax.
Clyde Packer

[In 1984 on Dr Germaine Greer who recently published the book Sex and Destiny.] I like her…
Clyde Packer

[In 1984 on getting his interview tapes for ‘No Return Ticket’ transcribed.] My main difficulty in writing it in America has been getting my interview tapes transcribed. Multiple Australian accents on a tape baffled several American transcription services. Finally Maureen Lance, a Londoner, stepped into the breach with brisk efficiency.
Clyde Packer

[In 1984.] I remember Robert Hughes as a young man in Sydney. He was almost too good looking and his masculine beauty was well matched by his virtuosity.
Clyde Packer

[In 1984.] I was talking to an Australian writer recently who said the trouble with setting a novel or a film in Australia is that if you’re writing a sage like McCullough, yes, that’s all right, and if you’re writing something quaint or weird, that’s fine too, but she feels the huge US market is not yet prepared to accept Australians in a novel as ordinary people.
Clyde Packer

[In 1984.] I suppose the concept of convict labour in an alien land is in some respects theoretically more oppressive than slavery in America. The owners did not have to look after the merchandise… There was no economic incentive to provide decent conditions.
Clyde Packer

[In 1984.] Australians are still not always generous with their expatriates.
Clyde Packer

[In 1984.] Too often the case at the Phillip Street Theatre, in my view: poor writing and traffic-cop direction rescued by extraordinary individual performances.
Clyde Packer



[In 1984.] Not many Australians who have ventured abroad have made their name in banking and finance. It is an area in which Australians have usually not shown great flair or personal initiative. This may be because their domestic banking and finance industries have been highly derivative, or because they have been heavily protected and regulated by paternalistic governments of all colours. James David Wolfenson is one of the few Australian’s to have broken that mould.
Clyde Packer

[In 1984 on James David Wolfenson.] He still carries with him a letter from Sir Sigmund Warburg, the distinguished German-born merchant banker, which quotes from his own mother, who said: ‘There are those who look at such events as disappointments and become poorer, and those who look at them as experiences and become richer.’
Clyde Packer

[In 1984.] In the financial world it was often said the one drawback about a partnership in Salomon Brothers was that it was difficult to get capital withdrawn from the partnership.
Clyde Packer

[On Dr Germaine Greer in 1984.] Now in her forties, she continues to be a strikingly attractive woman. Her hair is longer and she had gained a few kilos since I last saw her almost ten years ago, but she has lost none of her intensity or lanky green-eyed charm. Greer became a media-event in 1970 when she published ‘The Female Eunuch’ and she has remained one ever since.
Clyde Packer

[More in 1984 on Dr Germaine Greer.] I talked to her about her life before she broke silence with ‘Eunuch’. She was thirty years old when it was released. I wanted to know what lay behind that passionate stream of anger.
Clyde Packer

[In 1984.] Like most publishers who buy a press to print a weekly newspaper [Maxwell] Newton faced the problem of keeping of keeping it busy on the six days of the week when the ‘Observer’ wasn’t published. He acquired the rights to a line of American comics…
Clyde Packer

[In 1984.] In showbusiness nothing is ever final.
Clyde Packer

[In January 1987 on his brother Kerry Packer selling to Alan Bond.] I’m just pleased he made a deal he’s happy with.
Clyde Packer

[In January 1987.] Obviously he was aware you people would ring me and he wanted to give me warning. Thank heavens he did.
Clyde Packer

[In January 1987 on being asked what Kerry Packer had told him about the sale of the Channel Nine television stations and his radio interests.] It’s a private matter. Are you married? [‘No.’ – Ali Cromie.] If you were married and I asked you how often you made love with your husband, would you answer?
Clyde Packer



[On moving to the United States in 1976.] When I came here, I had a television documentary company with a friend of mine in L.A.. I made documentaries for the ABC, one of which won an Emmy. That one also lost more money than the others. I decided the serious business to be in was publishing, and I’ve been in that ever since.
Clyde Packer

[On owning a magazine consulting business called ‘Magazine Investment and Management’ but his brother not being a client.] He’s very rarely come to me for advice.
Clyde Packer

[In January 1987 on not knowing his brother’s future intentions.] We’re just brothers, not in anyway associated in business.
Clyde Packer

[In January 1987.] I had animosity with my father – never with my brother.
Clyde Packer

[In January 1987 on whether he misses the limelight that goes with being a living example of ‘The Packer Legend’ in Australia.] Negative.
Clyde Packer

[In January 1987 on his business.] I control it. There are no other shareholders. I’m the only employee. I run it from my house.
Clyde Packer

[To Mike Willesee.] You will do as you’re told. ['I will not. You know, you can't do both. You can't run a current affairs program as you couldn't run a serious newspaper and have people tell you you can't have the leader of the Trade Union movement'. So I said, you know 'Well Clyde, I quit. I'm out and I can't work here any more'. And Clyde suddenly relaxed and smiled and offered to shake hands and I thought 'this is silly' so I shook hands and said 'What's all this about?' – Mike Willese.] Congratulations. I just resigned too.
Clyde Packer

[On ‘What finally made you decide to get out?’ – Reporter] What, you mean out of Australia? [‘Yeah, and television.’ – Reporter.] Well there was two, you know. There was a couple of years between the two things and I decided to leave Australia, I suppose, because I am a very private person and it was very hard to be private in Australia. The last name kept popping up.
Clyde Packer

[On his Nanny Inez McCracken.] A very kind person, totally devoted to me and my brother, a surrogate mother. She taught me everything… how to read, write, she game me the only religious instruction I ever had.
Clyde Packer

[On his Nanny – Nanny Packer (Inez McCracken).] She had made an unbearable childhood tolerable… the day I lost my nanny was the unhappiest day of my life.
Clyde Packer



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