Top 177 Quotes & Sayings by Bill Bailey
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English comedian Bill Bailey.
Last updated on November 21, 2024.
I am pretty laid-back as a parent, but I do like a lot of activity. So I am constantly suggesting things to do that involve some physical activity: cycling, mountain biking and paddleboarding.
London is a great place to be over Christmas.
Great music and great artists create their own music and look and are not manufactured.
Comedy can be quite all consuming at times, and if you're not careful you end up doing a tour, then a DVD, then another tour then a DVD. Suddenly the years have just flown by.
My earliest memory is feeling soil between my fingers when I was around three years old.
When I was in Cardiff, playing with the National Orchestra of Wales, they said they get letters from people complaining if they're smiling during the concert. Nuts, isn't it? As if you have to respect the solemnity of the music by not smiling. Music is this joyful thing that enriches our lives, and you're not supposed to smile?
The point with me is that it's always been, even with the stand-up, that the music has to be right. You have to take it seriously. You have to try and play it as faithfully as possible. That way it helps the comedy. Rather than just playing it in a silly way.
I grew up in a little town between Bath and Bristol with my parents and grandparents in the same house. It was rural and idyllic.
One of the things I do really appreciate is that my audiences tend to be a wide range of ages and backgrounds, and I ascribe that to putting in the hours.
Comedy is an indoors thing, so I take every opportunity to go outside. A lot of that involves finding places that are remote, or places where you can look at birds, or do mountain biking or paddle boarding or walking.
As a comedian and satirist you have to be neutral, because everyone's fair game. Once you show bias, you lose that.
If you're going to perform, you're going to attract criticism. You can't please everyone all the time. You don't know how things are going to come out. But that's part of the fun of it, the adventure of doing any kind of art.
I have sold stuff door-to-door, but not doors.
You spend a lot more time on your own as an only child. And there's space to allow your imagination to take flight.
The worst thing is when people try and take pictures surreptitiously. I always say, 'Look, you can ask me for a photograph. You will get a much better one than just the side of my face.' Sometimes they just run off. They can't cope.
My grandparents lived with us. And I remember watching 'Doctor Who' with my granddad on his new telly. These were the days before remote controls but my granddad, being quite a resourceful sort of chap, had fashioned his own remote control - which was a length of bamboo pole with a bit of cork that he'd glued on the end.
There is something very poignant about plastic bags. These lonely plastic bags that gradually disintegrate.
Comedy should be fluid. It should be both Left and Right wing.
I think that generally there's a pressure to live the best life you can.
The Dutch do have a slightly odd sense of humour.
I'm an omnivore, although I am trying to eat less meat. I went vegetarian for about two years, then I suddenly got a craving one morning and that was it.
I didn't have any brothers or sisters, so I did a lot of stuff where I entertained myself playing games, reading a lot, a lot of fantasy novel stuff.
I quite like confounding people's expectations.
I love to watch birds and wildlife.
Paddle boarding: it's the closest you get to walking on water.
I think happiness really happens when you least expect it: it's when you're not really thinking about it, when you're not trying to achieve it, when you're not trying to get the perfect holiday, the perfect life, the perfect body, the perfect existence.
The two worst enemies of comedy are lack of sleep and not having had a decent meal.
People perceive me as this kind of hippy intellectual, reflecting and communing with nature or in a pyramid somewhere chanting. Really, no. I love speed, fast things, quad and road bikes, and bombing down a mountain.
The Lib Dems are such terrible ditherers.
I'm one for new things: I like new technology, I like new music, I'm not entrenched in some view of what culture should be. I like the fact that it's constantly changing and that language is changing, that behaviour changes.
I met Amy Winehouse a few times and she was always funny, charming and self-deprecating - just a delight to be around.
I used to live on a houseboat near Hammersmith Bridge.
In my twenties, I floated around for years, doing the odd theatre job but mainly leading a hedonistic lifestyle, getting intoxicated in plenty of different ways in plenty of different places.
Fatherhood made everything more straightforward. I was relieved that no longer did I have to agonise over what meaning I had in my life.
As a young man, the temptation was to drink the minibar dry. I did all that - now I prefer to get outdoors.
You have to have a thick skin, yes. If you're going to do something as foolhardy as standup, you've got to be able to take it on the chin if someone has a go at you.
I get a lot of nutters in my audiences.
Somehow the Tories have deflected the righteous anger at the bankers who we bailed out. The Tories manage to take that outrage and direct it at benefit claimants. It's genius. Evil genius.
I realised that the 'future' is different to how I imagined it. When I was a kid I thought it would be a bright, shiny Tomorrow's World. It isn't.
My comedy comes from the actual music itself - they're observational musical gags. I could take the music away and it would just be some words.
At school, I was bored with the teachers, and there were moments where I felt they were singling me out.
People are obsessed by how I look.
I don't think any comic could say there isn't a bit of them that doesn't want to show off.
Twenty-two years I've been doing this comedy lark, so it's been like a meteoric rise to fame... if the meteor was being dragged by an arthritic donkey across a ploughed field, in northern Poland.
At yoga you get some sense of spiritual space so that people don't intrude. You can go there and close your eyes and no one will talk to you. People are too worried about not fainting to bother with some bloke who was on the telly.
If I'm a national treasure, does that mean I'm like the Elgin Marbles and will get repatriated at some point?
If you really push yourself you can perhaps achieve something you didn't think you could.
As I get older, I have a very strong urge to know about stuff. I want to learn the names of trees and birds; that's the sort of knowledge I want to pass on to my son.
In a way, I wish none of it had ever happened - Facebook, Twitter - if it had never happened the world would have just carried on serenely. It's utterly redundant and yet we all have to be involved in it somehow.
When I was 15, I went to see the Stranglers at Bath Pavilion. I saw Jean-Jacques Burnel take off his bass and whack a skinhead over the head with it because he gave a Nazi salute. I thought: 'This is brilliant!'
Normally, with stand-up, it's quite solitary, you write the material on your own, you perform it on your own, it's all very much on you. Your own thoughts. You have to sort of modulate your own performance.
I think people are quite refreshed with politicians who aren't concerned with what Arctic Monkeys track they like, but with the day-to-day, dull business of politics.
Having a break from comedy is quite good.
I discovered I'm 60 per cent Viking. Well, more Danish, I suppose. I'm also two-and-a-half per cent Neanderthal.
For me, audio books was about when you can't actually physically get hold of a book, like when you're driving. It's a fantastic companion on a long journey.
We live in the age of entitlement, as opposed to enlightenment.
I hate getting ill, it irritates me so I try to stay reasonably healthy.
A lot of the time, you need to find the right home for ideas. You know, sometimes you think 'oh this'd be a sitcom, oh, no it wouldn't, it'd be a drama, or an educational thing, or a doco or something.' I've got loads of ideas and you just have to keep sending them and pitching them.
I think gaming has influenced popular culture in a huge way. It's worked its way into novels, and blockbuster movies.
All kinds of things have gone into my shows - cajun and rock bands, Bollywood, Kraftwerk tributes, effects and so on. As long as it services the comedy, everything is up for grabs.
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