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
#4. I enjoy performing, always, but when you're taping a gig, you've got to blank out this mass apparatus of self-consciousness that's surrounding you, this invitation to drown in self-consciousness. Otherwise you just won't be able to do anything.
Dylan Moran
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Organic? I grew up on Angel Delight. We didn't have anything in the house if it wasn't neon!
Dylan Moran
#9. Fruit ... it's just God showing off. "Look at all the colours I know!"
Dylan Moran
#10. When did you ever hear of a child not in need? 'Oh that's enough jam tart for me, I'll just go now and clean the toilets.'
Dylan Moran
#11. When I was a child, I wanted to watch things that made me laugh. It's attacking boredom, as simple as that. I was 19 when I first went to a comedy club - I wanted to do it, so I gave it a try and that was it. I found my office.
Dylan Moran
#12. The truth is that I'm constitutionally incapable of doing an ordinary job.
Dylan Moran
#13. What I prefer is an audience who listen. And are intelligent. Which I try and assume every audience is. And that if something goes wrong, it's generally my fault and not theirs.
Dylan Moran
#14. I was fat! I was pustule-rich! I looked like a pink human grenade! When did I blossom into the irresistible little orchid that I am now? I don't know. Getting taller helps. It spreads out a bit.
Dylan Moran
#15. A lot of the fiction I read growing up was post-war American, and not all of it centers on Manhattan, but around people of the Mad Men generation, people like John Cheever and, in more modern times, Don DeLillo, who I always mention.
Dylan Moran
#16. I'm really not big on nationalism, to be honest with you. I really don't think it gets people anywhere except near a pile of dead bodies. I'm Irish, yeah, but I don't need to get up on a soapbox about it.
Dylan Moran
#17. I have no qualifications to do anything else and there weren't any formal application forms you had to fill in for stand-up, so I thought I'd give that a twist.
Dylan Moran
#18. 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
#20. I quite fancy the 1940s. I like the trams and the trousers.
Dylan Moran
#21. Its not easy being a man you know. I had to get dressed today ... and there are other pressures.
Dylan Moran
#22. People will kill you over time. And how they'll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases like 'be realistic'.
Dylan Moran
#23. The characters can't be wittier than people are in real life. They have to be character witty.
Dylan Moran
#24. You see the button with the guy with the tray, and you push it, AND HE ARRIVES WITH A SANDWICH! ... And you think: "Yes! Yes! I control sandwich monkey! I live in magic land, magic land, magic land"
Dylan Moran
#25. 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
#26. Vodka is a very deceptive drink. You can't taste it, you can't smell it.
Dylan Moran
#27. 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
#28. You know what you are? You're a beard with an idiot hanging off it.
Dylan Moran
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. I feel very very old. My hair hurts. I have buttocks all over my body and I can't even smoke properly any more. I don't have lungs, I just have two poppadoms in here.
Dylan Moran
#33. Money can't buy you love, but it can get you some really good chocolate ginger biscuits.
Dylan Moran
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. I don't go around thinking of myself as a great anything.
Dylan Moran
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. Lots of comics try stuff out all year round, which is very sensible - I don't.
Dylan Moran
#42. Two young, fit, healthy attractive people in love? There's nothing worse to look at in the world.
Dylan Moran
#43. 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
#44. [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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. Tequila? It's not even a drink. It's a way for having the cops around without using a phone.
Dylan Moran
#48. Paper acts as an eraser on the mind, as soon as you look at what you've written.
Dylan Moran
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. In the same way, there is some creature gnawing away inside of me, urging me to do things in different ways.
Dylan Moran
#54. I was lucky in the sense that I was never blessed with an overly reflective nature.
Dylan Moran
#55. 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
#56. I don't know what I want but I know that I want it now.
Dylan Moran
#57. Don't clap I'm not a jazz band for Christ's sake.
Dylan Moran
#58. He looks like a horse in a man costume!
Dylan Moran
#59. I do not walk around imaging myself to be intimidating or smart.
Dylan Moran
#60. 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
#61. If I hadn't done this I might have ended up digging the roads.
Dylan Moran
#62. I need a healthy injection of cynicism right now.
Dylan Moran
#63. Children are the most honest critics. They will say 'You're funny', but also 'You're pathetic - go away.'
Dylan Moran
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Shame is one of the greatest aphrodisiacs in the world, anyway, built into religion.
Dylan Moran
#67. I thought The Office was good, though I didn't think of it as a sitcom, just as a very good programme.
Dylan Moran
#68. 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
#69. Now I'm not an expert at mathematics, but I calculated it would take at least three of me to take on one third of one of them, even if they were attacking me with just their arse.
Dylan Moran
#70. I don't see teenagers anymore. I see ... I see youths. Slumped S shapes in their hoodies, all huddled round a bin of burning grannies. All texting eachother because they've given up on speech.
Dylan Moran
#71. 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
#72. What's the weather like? ... It's fierce mild!
Dylan Moran
#73. 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
#74. I think a lot of the time you just parody yourself.
Dylan Moran
#75. Yeah, I think Michael has had to deal with that label of being Michael Caine for a long time.
Dylan Moran
#76. 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
#77. I did throw a lot of eggs into one basket, as you do in your teenage years - 'I am buying these records, I am wearing this'. I did quite a bit of that. You have to do it, wear your stupid shoes, wear your stupid hair.
Dylan Moran
#78. I'm a quitter. I come from a long line of quitters. It's amazing I'm here at all.
Dylan Moran
#79. 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
#80. 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
#82. Because their bones are growing, they can only sleep in certain positions, obviously. The crucifix and the swastika tend to be the most popular. Sometimes a combination of the two.
Dylan Moran
#83. Look at his face. I bet his cornflakes try to crawl out of the bowl.
Dylan Moran
#84. The trend now is to get away from stage bound sitcoms.
Dylan Moran
#85. Why do I even dare to think I could dream I could imagine I could hope?
Dylan Moran
#86. I don't have lungs anymore! Just two spare bags that flew in under a bridge one day.
Dylan Moran
#87. 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
#88. EGGS! They're not a food, they belong in no group! They're just farts clothed in substance!
Dylan Moran
#89. Cooking? Oh we were great, you'd take anything and melt cheese on it, and the one who could guess what it was didn't have to wash up!
Dylan Moran
#90. It's easy to smile when you have a squirrel's intellect.
Dylan Moran
#91. I think that women just have a primeval instinct to make soup, which they will try to foist on anybody who looks like a likely candidate.
Dylan Moran
#92. You achieve the surreal jokes through the realism by making it elastic.
Dylan Moran
#93. You should be as alive as you can, until you're totally dead!
Dylan Moran
#94. I can't get involved in all the murders you need to commit to get this shit out of your system.
Dylan Moran
#95. 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
#96. And yet, people still turn to Jesus. You will notice though that the kind of people who turn to Jesus tend to be the sort of people who haven't done that well with everybody else.
Dylan Moran
#97. One thing that's coming up a lot is: are you as grumpy as you appear from this Black Books thing.
Dylan Moran
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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