Top 100 Dylan Moran Quotes
#1. Showing off seemed to me to be a highly valuable and necessary activity when I was 20.
Dylan Moran
#2. He could dismiss several schools of philosophy by shifting slightly in his chair or toting his whisky glass.
Dylan Moran
#3. I've seen stand up comedy, and after a while you start to notice that a lot of people are doing things that are like a lot of other people. There can be a bit of a herd mentality, and that's obviously less interesting because there's less going on. I'm just being totally frank with you.
Dylan Moran
#5. America's work ethic is non-stop; it's not even enshrined in law that workers have to get their two weeks holiday money. But Americans work harder than everyone else I can think of.
Dylan Moran
#6. Everybody is corrupted by hotel rooms. You can't help it. It's the only place in the world where you walk in and the first think you do is steal everything before you take your coat off.
Dylan Moran
#7. The truth is that I'm constitutionally incapable of doing an ordinary job.
Dylan Moran
#8. I get a phone call once every 18 months from some mad person who wants me to do something for less than no money and they give me about a week's notice. That's my film career, most of the time.
Dylan Moran
#9. Its not easy being a man you know. I had to get dressed today ... and there are other pressures.
Dylan Moran
#10. People will kill you over time. And how they'll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases like 'be realistic'.
Dylan Moran
#11. I think you should, yeah. You should wash your beard, then shave it off, nail it to a Frisbee and fling it over a rainbow.
Dylan Moran
#12. Vodka is a very deceptive drink. You can't taste it, you can't smell it.
Dylan Moran
#13. I don't watch a whole lot of stand up. Mainly I prefer to read writers; they make me laugh the most. Something gets you when you're alone and someone's voice is coming through their work. There's a different quality to it that stays with you a bit more.
Dylan Moran
#14. You know what you are? You're a beard with an idiot hanging off it.
Dylan Moran
#15. My drive to put myself on the line comes from boredom. From that feeling when you go to bed and think, 'What did I do today?' It doesn't have to be something monumental, just a feeling that you really tried to look at something, or look into something.
Dylan Moran
#16. If you covered a broom handle with oil and shoved it up my arse, then put me on a trampoline, in a lift, I could write a better song on the walls.
Dylan Moran
#17. The measure of a conversation is how much mutual recognition there is in it; how much shared there is in it. If you're talking about what's in your own head, or without thought to what people looking and listening will feel, you might as well be in a room talking to yourself.
Dylan Moran
#18. Money can't buy you love, but it can get you some really good chocolate ginger biscuits.
Dylan Moran
#19. When I was young, all the politicians looked like ancient Latin teachers or greengrocers. They were mumbly, stumbly men with their hair blowing in their eyes, walking into trees, opening the wrong door. They had no idea how to present themselves.
Dylan Moran
#20. Irish people give big hellos and very little goodbyes. Unless they're female, and then they spend five hours talking in the doorway to the person that's leaving their house.
Dylan Moran
#21. People will kill you. Over time. They will shave out every last morsel of fun in you with little, harmless sounding phrases that people uses every day, like: 'Be realistic!'
[What It Is (2009)]
Dylan Moran
#22. I wanted to show off - a simple impulse or drive; in much the same way as some kids wanted to play football, I wanted to show off. Not complicated in that sense, very natural; it just depends on how you want to show off.
Dylan Moran
#23. I don't go around thinking of myself as a great anything.
Dylan Moran
#24. Vodka! That's a child's drink, why am I drinking this stupid drink, oh and why am I on a traffic island?
Dylan Moran
#25. I fear we might be losing the basic human facility to be alone - and with that you throw out independent decision-making, what to trust, what not to trust; key stuff - a perilous loss.
Dylan Moran
#26. Lots of comics try stuff out all year round, which is very sensible - I don't.
Dylan Moran
#27. Two young, fit, healthy attractive people in love? There's nothing worse to look at in the world.
Dylan Moran
#28. I draw hundreds and hundreds of pictures of sort of gnarly looking men, so I don't know what that tells you. People who look like ... they're waiting for a sandwich that's never going to come. I don't know what's wrong with me.
Dylan Moran
#29. [Adulthood feels like] walking around in the desert with a bag over your head, being bumped into by people who rob you as they bore you.
Dylan Moran
#30. When you say 'Bedtime, bedtime, bedtime!' that's not what the child hears. What the child hears is 'Lie down in the dark ... for hours ... and don't move ... I'm locking the door now.'
Dylan Moran
#31. You're not going to learn anything if you're not prepared to go flat, so I'm very happy to go flat.
Dylan Moran
#32. Tequila? It's not even a drink. It's a way for having the cops around without using a phone.
Dylan Moran
#33. I never really had a career, to be honest with you. I never in my life sat down and planned it. I have thought, 'Oh, I'd like to do this,' like anybody would. But I'm not the type that says, 'If I do this, it will lead to that.'
Dylan Moran
#34. If you're a comic, you don't have a rehearsal room; you rehearse on stage. My main concern is remembering everything. I've written lots of material, but how do you memorise 90 minutes? That's one hell of a long speech. I've always had problems with that.
Dylan Moran
#35. Now, I meant to talk about something else earlier on, and I've forgotten what it was. I've remembered what it is again, but I've also forgotten. And that's really what adult life is like most of the time.
Dylan Moran
#36. Children are very overprotected now, in lots of ways. We're very nervous about them. You know, people go, "Don't go outside! Or inside! Get into the cupboard with some spinach!" When I was a child they'd kick you out and you weren't expected to come back until there were bats!
Dylan Moran
#37. In the same way, there is some creature gnawing away inside of me, urging me to do things in different ways.
Dylan Moran
#38. I was lucky in the sense that I was never blessed with an overly reflective nature.
Dylan Moran
#39. It should not be an act of social disobedience to light a cigarette. Unless you're actually a doctor working at an incubator.
Dylan Moran
#40. Don't clap I'm not a jazz band for Christ's sake.
Dylan Moran
#41. He looks like a horse in a man costume!
Dylan Moran
#42. When things are going well, I can't write fast enough to keep up with my mind. Writing walks, speech runs and talk flies. Other times, though, it's like fishing.
Dylan Moran
#43. If I hadn't done this I might have ended up digging the roads.
Dylan Moran
#44. I need a healthy injection of cynicism right now.
Dylan Moran
#45. I'm not drunk onstage, although I've done that a couple of times when I was younger. It's partly just the way I talk - I talk like somebody in a rocking chair. I'm your 150-year-old grandmother.
Dylan Moran
#46. Or that other bullshit, 'I need more space.' People never quantify exactly how much space they need, but strangely enough it always seems to be the exact same height, depth, and breadth as you.
Dylan Moran
#47. There's always a host of voices you're inspired by. I love Don DeLillo, and I love Isaac Bashevis Singer, and I love Beckett, and I love Pinter. He's one of the funniest voices in English literature since Dickens.
Dylan Moran
#48. As an Irish person, there's a historical fascination with America: America is the default green and promised land for Irish people and Italians; that's what we grow up with.
Dylan Moran
#49. What's the weather like? ... It's fierce mild!
Dylan Moran
#50. I can't swim. I can't drive, either. I was going to learn to drive but then I thought, well, what if I crash into a lake?
Dylan Moran
#51. Black Books adheres to a more old fashioned, traditional sitcom format, which I think works, because in its own way, it's quite theatrical.
Dylan Moran
#52. I'm a quitter. I come from a long line of quitters. It's amazing I'm here at all.
Dylan Moran
#53. I would never really analyse what I do. I leave that to other people - I'm not a critic. I just want to get on with whatever I have in hand, you know? Just try to make the best job of the available material.
Dylan Moran
#54. Maybe this is just me, but as time goes by, I'm more bewildered by modernity. It gets more unfathomable with every passing year.
Dylan Moran
#56. Look at his face. I bet his cornflakes try to crawl out of the bowl.
Dylan Moran
#57. The trend now is to get away from stage bound sitcoms.
Dylan Moran
#58. Why do I even dare to think I could dream I could imagine I could hope?
Dylan Moran
#59. I don't have lungs anymore! Just two spare bags that flew in under a bridge one day.
Dylan Moran
#60. I never thought I want to do anything, really, except not go to work properly and turn up at the same place every day and eat sandwiches in the same canteen, if I can possibly help it, as I don't think I'd be very good at it.
Dylan Moran
#61. EGGS! They're not a food, they belong in no group! They're just farts clothed in substance!
Dylan Moran
#62. It's easy to smile when you have a squirrel's intellect.
Dylan Moran
#63. You achieve the surreal jokes through the realism by making it elastic.
Dylan Moran
#64. I can't get involved in all the murders you need to commit to get this shit out of your system.
Dylan Moran
#65. Home gigs can be hard because it's an odd collision. More than anything, I feel self-conscious when my family are in the audience. I'm doing this job which is not quite acting - part of it is me, part performance. You're presenting a cartoon of yourself to people who know you as a line-drawing.
Dylan Moran
#66. One thing that's coming up a lot is: are you as grumpy as you appear from this Black Books thing.
Dylan Moran
#67. I suppose the best comedy shows do have the rock n' roll feeling - if it's a great night, and the roof is raised ... yeah, it's a similar feeling, sure.
Dylan Moran
#68. I'm fascinated by how you'll change your position so many times over a lifetime, but really what you're doing is occupying a series of positions on a landscape.
Dylan Moran
#69. The terror of failure can make you feel like a failure. So a bunch of people think you're not very good at your thing. How much do you invest in what they say? How much do you care? Failure is not putting yourself on the line.
Dylan Moran
#70. I'm just trying to understand what's around me as much as anyone else is, really. To draw a bead on a moving target.
Dylan Moran
#71. Women are like canoes, full of soup. At first everyone is suspicious but then everyone wants one.
Dylan Moran
#72. I have a very low level of recognition, which is fine by me.
Dylan Moran
#73. You know, just sometimes in between the first cigarette with coffee in the morning to that 400th glass of cornershop piss at 3am
you do sometimes look at yourself and think
this is fantastic. I'm in heaven.
Dylan Moran
#74. You're never going to go. Why would you go? It's a disgusting place. It's always wet even when it's dry. There's nothing there. Farmers aren't really people, you know this. They're just necessary, we need somebody to kill cows.
Dylan Moran
#75. Don't do it! Stay away from your potential. You'll mess it up, it's potential, leave it. Anyway, it's like your bank balance - you always have a lot less than you think.
Dylan Moran
#76. Beer must be made by food companies. It makes you wander the streets at 3 am looking for things to eat. "What's that, is it moving, get it!! It's a nun! FRY HER!! FRY HER!"
Dylan Moran
#77. I write all the time, but you just want to be careful what you put out. That's all. You want to have the confidence that you've done what you need to do to it, because otherwise it's an exercise in vanity.
Dylan Moran
#78. A man does not know how he came by the half a pie he is holding in his hand!
Dylan Moran
#79. I'm a vegetarian, well I'm not hardcore because I eat meat, but only because I like the taste, and I hate vegetables on a personal level so I'm not too good!
Dylan Moran
#80. What are children anyway? Midget drunks. They greet you in the morning by kneeing you in the face and talking gibberish. They can't even walk straight.
Dylan Moran
#81. I've always been a big consumer of American journalism over the years and had an interest in the history of it and of the press in America; how it has changed.
Dylan Moran
#82. I'm just a guy who happens to work in public from time to time. I've built a reputation as an established comic, not as a celebrity - a celebrity is someone who is famous but doesn't do anything.
Dylan Moran
#83. Kids, they are always hurting themselves. It's like, "Quick, get me to casualty quick!" while your doing something important like sitting down picking your ear.
Dylan Moran
#84. Do your own thing. Speak in your voice.
Dylan Moran
#85. I don't really think of myself as an actor.
Dylan Moran
#86. It probably says something really clinically terrible about my character that I need to get up on a stage and go 'Ra ra ra' in front of people.
Dylan Moran
#87. You cannot over estimate how infantile men are about sex! Men are people that have sex BECAUSE they have a headache ... or are on fire, or have been shot in the head, or whatever it is!
Dylan Moran
#88. I'm actually about as famous as a fourth division footballer from the 70s.
Dylan Moran
#89. I'm organised in some ways, but not in others.
Dylan Moran
#90. You learn very very quickly that it is mostly about swearing, actually. That's all you're doing, swearing, in a box with wheels.
Dylan Moran
#91. I'm delighted to make as many people feel ashamed as possible. There's probably a site like that for everybody. I've heard Newt Gingrich has his own as well.
Dylan Moran
#92. What is universal can be surprising. Over time you find the kind of stuff which has people thinking 'That is just something that occurred to me ... there's something wrong with me', is in fact stuff that is universal.
Dylan Moran
#93. I've been writing since I was very young, even before I was a teenager. As far as I'm concerned, I am a writer - whether my writing's spoken or written in a blog, paper, book or printed on the side of a submarine.
Dylan Moran
#94. I was very into New Order, Joy Division, all of that when I was younger. I had a lot of bootlegs that I saved up my pocket money to buy. I had all the obscure early EPs.
Dylan Moran
#95. You try various things when you're growing up. I was an attache in the Foreign Service for a while and then I drove a bulldozer, but neither of those panned out for me so it had to be stand-up.
Dylan Moran
#96. I'm very drawn to Eastern Europe, so I like a Hungarian writer who wrote in French called Emil Cioran; he was always good for giving me such a stir.
Dylan Moran
#97. I have tried ... believe me, I have tried to like rap music. It makes me feel so very, very old. I have tried to get home with the downies.
Dylan Moran
#98. I wish I was like you! You know startled by direct sunlight.
Dylan Moran
#99. Then you get these articles about how unhealthy life is in the city. You know; mobile phone tumours - far more likely in the city; Well you know what, so is everything else! Including sex, coffee and conversation.
Dylan Moran
#100. I do think it's perfectly natural and human to want to invest belief in something. It's just a facet of who we are. What do I believe in? I believe in the obvious things. The people I'm close to and my work - it's not complicated.
Dylan Moran
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