Top 258 Quotes & Sayings by Denis Leary - Page 4

I'm in my truck talking to Jesus. And you can see a World Series ring on my right pinkie finger. But when I take my sunglasses off a second later, it's gone. It's the whole divine intervention thing. You know Jesus had something to do with them winning.

White men have screwed this country up! I would like a black, female…. everything all rolled into one.I want something different. I want a real change. People, I want a president who speaks well, who has a sense of humor. This guy is such a moron! It's beyond the point where it's a joke. He's an idiot.

My kids watch everything downloaded; they have no idea what the numbers or the names of the channels mean, except "FX makes the show that I see on my computer." So it's harder to get a show on the air, but at the same time, there are a lot of terrific shows.

I went to school with Steven Wright who was the shyest guy I knew, and one day someone suddenly told me that he was in a club doing standup comedy. I went down to his club and he was great. Another friend of mine, who was pretty much a thief by trade, was hosting the show. So I thought if these guys can do it then so can I.

Sin is in, and so we begin.

Elvis and I call up Cadillac dealerships all night long, suckin' down Ny Quil stingers and cheese. He says, what the hell's Lisa Marie thinking with that Michael Jackson crap?

There's nothing wrong with an actor that can't improvise, but if you're going to improvise, you gotta make sure you got people that can play the game.

In my experience in series TV if you have a good crew and a great cast it's going to be a great group - similar to the theater where it's a bunch of people who are really talented and go to work each day and challenge each other and if you are lucky enough to get a hit then it's five or six or seven years of this kind of work.

I needed someone really intense, but also somebody with a lot of theatrical credibility.

One of the things I always believed in was my dad came to America and he was a very talented musician, but he couldn't make a living that way so he had to support his family as an auto mechanic which he also loved doing. He was also such a great dad because when I first told him I thought I wanted to go into show business, his response was okay, that's interesting.

It's hard to have a film and television career and do music work at the same time.

When I was doing standup, I always wanted to get out of the standup world and take it back into the theatrical world, like with "No Cure For Cancer."

I'm the Lord of the Dance! F-k Michael Flatley, it's me!

You know why the French hate us so much? Thay gave us the croissant. And you know what we did with it? We turned it into our croissandwich, thank you very much.

You really want to have a back-up plan, so when you don't feel like acting, or you're getting older and settling down, you can produce your own stuff. So that's when I set about forming my own company and getting creative control.

This is the most exciting place in the world to live. Oh yeah! There are so many ways to die in New York City! Race riots, drive by shootings, subway crashes, construction cranes collapsing on the sidewalks, manhole covers blowing up and asbestos shooting into the sky.

It's human nature for people to expect people to be what they see on the screen.

Coffee doesn't need a menu, it needs a cup. That's all it needs! Maybe a saucer underneath the cup — that's it.

We didn't have rehab back in the Seventies. Back in the Seventies, rehab meant you stopped doing coke, but you kept smoking pot and drinking for a couple more weeks.

There's no way around it, drama is very difficult to shoot. It's very heavy and something that you carry with you for the course of the day.

Heavy Metal fans are buying Heavy Metal records, taking the records home, listening to the records and then blowing their heads off with shotguns? Where's the problem? That's an unemployment solution right there, folks! It's called natural selection.

People are disappointed that you aren't exactly who they thought you were, as opposed to somebody who's just walking around trying to get some laundry done.

I'm gonna get one of those tracheotomies, so I can smoke two cigarettes at the same time! I'm gonna get nine tracheotomies, all around my neck, I'll be Tracheotomy Man! He can smoke a pack at a time, he's Tracheotomy Man!

You get to a certain point, especially if you're a comedian, where people think certain things. It's like, I don't take the time to explain it to people, it's just part of what I do.

At some level, you've got to have the ability to - especially in film and in front of the camera, you got to have the ability to drop into character and close off the entire crew and the camera and everything else.

Yeah, I love living in New York, man, and people who live in New York, we wear that fact like a badge right on our sleeve because we know that fact impresses everybody! I was in Vietnam. So what? I live in New York!

On a movie, you have a great time, and you're really enjoying the work, and then everybody is done and goes their separate ways, and you maybe never get to work with those people again.

Charlotte Rampling, when she was younger, looked exactly like my wife. That's one of the reasons that when I first saw my wife, my knees buckled. Based on her looks alone, she was already in my kitchen making eggs.

Everybody's vying for people's attention in terms of eyeballs, earholes, and dollars.

"Yeah, well, if you eat red meat, it stays in your colon for fifteen years!" Good! I paid for it; I want it in my ass, okay? I want them to find a meat sweater from my esophagus to my asshole when they open me up in the end! "This guy's covered in meat! He's Meat-Man! He's Meat-Tracheotomy-Man!"

Don't buy the toys that make the noise!

Good actors, especially when they know their character, will come in and either tell you in advance that they have an idea, or in the middle of the rehearsal or the scene they'll let it loose and you go, "Ah that's great."

The filter's the best part. That's where they put the heroin.

There's a method aspect to Campbell Scott character and he really wants to get into his character and he wants to cast to go on a fast so that by the time the play opens nobody's eaten in three days because he wants the audience to feel the pain from the stage.

Rosemary Rodriguez directed on Rescue Me for us, and I love her. She's fantastic with actresses and she's got a great sense of humor. That was a huge thing for me.

The key thing is to get that one splash - that one song or that one video for a song - that catches people's eyes. Because it's all digital content now.

When I become president, all you assholes that ride bikes in the city? Lock and load! You're going down!

I just think it's difficult for them to see the forest for the trees right now, which I can't blame them for, given the circumstances they found themselves in.

Did you ever notice they never take any fat hostages? You never see a guy coming out of Lebanon going: "I was held hostage for seven months and I lost 175 pounds, I feel good and I look good and I learned self-discipline. That's the important thing."

I wanted a more female point of view.

The second season is generally easier do because you know the actors better and they know the characters better and if everybody likes each other you can really go all types of places.

Once people start to think they've wasted parts of their life, or they're wasting their life as they speak, that means there's going to be great dramatic and comedic tension.

Liz [Gillies] doesn't really listen to anything new, besides Adele, Ariana Grande, and stuff like that. She loves '70s music and old '60s songs. She loves songwriters from the '70s that I hate, like Jim Croce and James Taylor, and she loves Stevie Nicks and old jazz classics.

It became sort of a snowball effect, with guys trying to deal in their own way with 9/11, whether it was drinking or whatever.

I try and shoot as often as I can, I cross shoot. I have at least two cameras rolling at the same time. So I'll have two actors or two sets of actors at a time so everybody's basically on camera. So when they improvise we have everybody's coverage. And you can then go in the editing room and find the energy still stays there.

All knowledge is ultimately rooted in metaphorical (or analogical) modes of perception and thought.

We've always talked about doing something else and Campbell Scott is always busy and I'm always busy. But when we came up with the idea of doing the potato famine as a hip hop musical, I wanted somebody who was going to bring gravity.

I certainly know guys in comedy, I know some actors, and I definitely know some musicians, who have survived to a certain age and make a good living doing what they do, but nobody knows who they are. They wake up every day and they have the ability to get paid practicing their art, but underneath it all, if you scratched the surface, you still get, "If I only had my own show . . .," or "If I only had my own band . . ." It's what people always do when they want to be their own star.

Julieanne Smolinksi has a history in rock journalism and she's a huge rock 'n' roll fan, and she was a huge fan of Ava (Elaine Hendrix) and Gigi (Elizabeth Gillies) and of the actresses. I was really lucky to get her, in between seasons on Grace and Frankie.

There are some guys I know for a fact, like Louis C.K., who always talk about how not-great of an actor he is, and he's terrific on his show. But I know Louis would play a fantastic dramatic role in something, too. He just needs somebody to grab him and say, "Come in here and do this."

He [ Campbell Scott ] is also a really funny guy which not a lot of people know.

My primary reason for bringing my son on was to have a voice on the show [Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll] that would bring a 25 or 26 year old point of view to it, and my son is very capable of writing that stuff.

Campbell [Scott] also directed me in a film with Hope Davis called Final. That was the first thing we did together, but I've known him for years.

I'm sick and tired of our generation being called the TV generation. What do you expect? We watched Lee Harvey Oswald get his brains blown out all over. How could we change the channel after that?

I love to smoke. I smoke seven thousand packs a day!

I was working with Peter Tolan, who was my writing partner on those two [Rescue Me and The Job], and he did The Larry Sanders Show with Garry Shandling, and he always said that the second season is better because you know the actors.

Personally, I think Jim Henson said it best when he said "Anybody got an aspirin? I think I've got a cold."

Peter Falk and Denis Leary today walked into a Starbucks and shot 27 people, without any announcement whatsoever.

I like to give the actors freedom to take what we have on the page and improve on it. And they do that quite a bit.

I've only done two other TV shows [instead of Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll], one was Rescue Me and the other was a show called The Job, which was at ABC and only on for two seasons.