Top 206 Quotes & Sayings by Dylan Moran
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Irish comedian Dylan Moran.
Last updated on December 23, 2024.
Do your own thing. Speak in your voice.
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.
I don't want to do panel games or adverts. I really like challenges. I always get roles as an art teacher or a photographer. In the future I want to play something like a mugger/assassin/pastry chef.
I'm organised in some ways, but not in others.
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.
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.
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.
I was lucky in the sense that I was never blessed with an overly reflective nature.
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.
One thing that's coming up a lot is: are you as grumpy as you appear from this Black Books thing.
Paper acts as an eraser on the mind, as soon as you look at what you've written.
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.
You can laugh at somebody because they are innocent, and because they are naive or they are about to walk into a wall, but if somebody's giving you stuff, if somebody's talking, giving you their take on things, what makes you laugh, generally speaking, is going to be somebody who is telling it in an angry way.
I'm actually about as famous as a fourth division footballer from the 70s.
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.
If I hadn't done this I might have ended up digging the roads.
Black Books adheres to a more old fashioned, traditional sitcom format, which I think works, because in its own way, it's quite theatrical.
The characters can't be wittier than people are in real life. They have to be character witty.
I grew up in a house where there was lots of teasing and language play and laughter; it was very important. When I was a teenager, you wouldn't go to a bar and find lots of televisions everywhere. People were talking. Talk was the mental fire you would gather around in the evening. It occupied a big part of your existence.
Maybe this is just me, but as time goes by, I'm more bewildered by modernity. It gets more unfathomable with every passing year.
Lots of comics try stuff out all year round, which is very sensible - I don't.
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.'
You have to assume that you're talking to the most intelligent, tuned-in audience you could ever get. That's the way you're going to get the best out of people. Whether they know you or not shouldn't matter for comedy. They should get to know you pretty quickly. and they should be having a good time pretty quickly.
I'd be hard-pressed to think of anybody who's made me laugh, who's funny, but who's also relentlessly positive.
I don't know that you're able to measure your aggregate wisdom as you go through life. I can't say that I ever feel that I'm sitting on top of a growing mound of wisdom.
I have a very low level of recognition, which is fine by me.
Showing off seemed to me to be a highly valuable and necessary activity when I was 20.
Some people have told me that I'm grumpy; it's not something that I'm aware of. It's not like I walk around poking children in the eye... not very small ones, anyway.
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.
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.
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.
I do not walk around imaging myself to be intimidating or smart.
I thought The Office was good, though I didn't think of it as a sitcom, just as a very good programme.
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.
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.
You're not going to learn anything if you're not prepared to go flat, so I'm very happy to go flat.
I don't really think of myself as an actor.
If you're a comic, you don't have a rehearsal room, you rehearse on stage. My main concern is remembering everything.
Yeah, I think Michael has had to deal with that label of being Michael Caine for a long time.
The trend now is to get away from stage bound sitcoms.
It's true that I have spoken about doing a book before, but then everyone you speak to is planning to write a book.
I don't go to different countries to criticise their political system and tell them what they should be doing - what do I know?
You know, people sometimes say to me, 'Do you prefer to do this or that, act or do stand-up or write' but the thing that I enjoy most is the difference between all of them, because you're always learning. I don't go around thinking of myself as a great anything. I'm actually lucky to have the chance to fail at all of them.
Children are the most honest critics. They will say 'You're funny', but also 'You're pathetic - go away.'
People will kill you over time, and how they'll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases, like 'be realistic.'
You can't please everyone, nor should you seek to, because then you won't please anyone, least of all yourself.
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.
You achieve the surreal jokes through the realism by making it elastic.
I think a lot of the time you just parody yourself.
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.
I don't want to do the same thing over and over again.
The East is very mysterious to Westerners. Even post-Cold War, it's still an unknown entity.
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.
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.
In the same way, there is some creature gnawing away inside of me, urging me to do things in different ways.
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.
We are both drawn to surreal situations so the writing was a joy.
The truth is that I'm constitutionally incapable of doing an ordinary job.
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.
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.
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