Top 125 Quotes & Sayings by Tim Minchin - Page 2

I never thought I was going to be an actor.

You do get a bit paranoid that you're becoming a sort of narcissist, an artistic solipsist when you're doing stand-up.

Because I'm on my own on stage and wear bare feet and look like a pixie, people always think I'm little.

The point of privilege and the notion of mansplaining is that sometimes I definitely feel like I should shut up. That's it functioning. That's the notion of privilege functioning.

I just want people to hold themselves to account about what they think more, because I strongly believe that the way to live a moral life is to not allow yourself to have beliefs which are easy but which don't make sense.

I was lucky enough to grow up in Western Australia and know that the Australian Outback is vast and spell-binding and heart-stoppingly beautiful, and the characters that inhabit it are unique and hilarious and tough and cheeky.

Hollywood seduces a person who's used to making theater, art, and having success on their own terms and then tries to squish them into a box and, eventually, throws the box out.

Comedy actually works best when you're living in an OK world, and you are pointing out the hypocrisy in apathy.

I had lunch with Andrew Lloyd Webber at the end of 2011 because my musical 'Matilda' is in one of the theatres that he owns in London.

I just always thought 'Groundhog Day' was potentially a great idea.

I don't like courting controversy because I don't like people not liking me.

It's about the audience - if they laugh and clap, you feed off that, and if they don't, you doubt everything you've ever done.

I'm a comedian because I want people to like me. That's really why all comedians are comedians.

Every song in 'Groundhog Day' works to forward the story in a chronological, narrative sense, to illuminate the state of mind of the person singing it and comment on the world.

When I came into comedy in 2005, I didn't even know there was discrimination against musical comics in the alternative-comedy strain.

I've spent years on stage adjusting the timing of a line to infinitesimal degrees.

I just do what I gotta do and try to show people I can write some funny lyrics and play piano, and hopefully that'll make them dig further. I really believe in my form. That's why I haven't done a lot of telly, and I'm not a regular on any panel shows, and I'm not in a sitcom or all those things.

I wake up in the morning quite excited by the notion that I get to immediately have a meal. That's the thing that gets me out of bed - just the thought of having a poached egg, or even some granola.

The Internet now is completely full of memes, and it's interesting, the idea that instead of having a sign crotched on your door or a magnet on your fridge saying whatever cliches and bon mots, pictures laid out with some text are passed around and move really fast.

I think there's something fundamentally wrong with thinking that there's a God who looks after you but kills everyone else. There's something, if not immoral, then gross, about it.

I don't want my work or me, as a person, to be held up as a paradigm because, as Richard Dawkins knows, if people hold you up too much, you're only ever going to disappoint them by being a human.

Comedy is often a short career because you get to a point where you are no longer a small thing punching up at targets; you are the big thing, and it's hard to write from that position.

As someone who has never been in a gossip magazine, I do not deserve the contempt of the term 'celebrity.'

My shows are basically about ethics.

In terms of comedy, I never did five-minute sets or clubs or anything. I just started doing shows. Coming from that theater background, it never crossed my mind that I should start doing five-minute sets.

Just because you're right-wing shouldn't mean you don't believe climate science data. They're unrelated.

I have come to the conclusion there is no point making anything if you're not going to make people laugh and cry.

I never watch television, although, the other night, my wife and I caught an episode of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' from Season Six. It's the only series of which I've ever watched every single episode.

When you become successful, half the population puts you on a pedestal, and half the population treats you with less respect than you would have got if you were collecting their bins.

Trying to work out where you find meaning and sense in a meaningless world is my obsession.

I'm quite a gregarious, outgoing person.

I was rejected by every agent in Australia when I was starting out. No one would represent me, because I didn't fit into a particular box, and I wasn't a trained musician or performer, but history has perhaps proven that perhaps I have something to give.

I don't quite think I'm big enough to deserve an orchestra.

That's the great part about arts - someone taking your work and making it something else; it's becomes a true collaboration.

I saw 'The Wild Duck' at the Belvoir St. Theatre in Sydney, and it was one of the best pieces of theatre I'd ever seen.

I'm not supporting nor not supporting TV casting shows - there is no doubt they are created for financial reasons - but I don't have a problem with wanting to sell tickets, and if you want to do an arena version of a rock musical, you have to sell a lot of tickets to justify the cast.

I know people come to my shows expecting me to give voice to some of the frustrations that nice, happy, progressive people like me have with the world.

My whole mission is to have a long, interesting career, not a short spiky one.

Fight for what is true. What is true is enough.

I see myself as an utterly unchanged Perth dude who likes sport as much as I like music and who just likes my family.

I spend so much time hating (my body) but it never says a bad word about me

Who's the world going to revolve around now?

We have tendency to define ourselves in opposition to stuff. But try to also express your passion for things you love. Be demonstrative and generous in your praise of those you admire. Send thank-you cards and give standing ovations. Be pro-stuff, not just anti-stuff.

Love without evidence is stalking.

A famous bon mot asserts that opinions are like arse-holes, in that everyone has one. There is great wisdom in this... but I would add that opinions differ significantly from arse-holes, in that yours should be constantly and thoroughly examined.We must think critically, and not just about the ideas of others. Be hard on your beliefs. Take them out onto the verandah and beat them with a cricket bat.... Be intellectually rigorous. Identify your biases, your prejudices, your privilege.

You know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work? - Medicine.

The day they discover yoga mats are carcinogenic will be the happiest day of my life.

It's the fine balance of caffeine and alcohol that bookends my days

Throughout history, every mystery ever solved has turned out to be NOT magic.

Isn’t this enough? Just this world? Just this beautiful, complex wonderfully unfathomable world? How does it so fail to hold our attention that we have to diminish it with the invention of cheap, man-made myths and monsters?

Empathy is intuitive, but it is also something you can work on intellectually.

Once you reject evidence as a source of knowledge, you don't gotta believe nothin' you don't like.

Please don't make the mistake of thinking that the arts and sciences are at odds with one another. That is a recent, stupid and damaging idea. You don't have to be unscientific to make beautiful art or to write beautiful things... science is not a body of knowledge or a belief system, it is just a term that describes humankind's incremental acquisition of understanding through observation. Science is awesome. The arts and sciences need to work together to improve how knowledge is communicated.

Science adjusts its views based on what's observed Faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved.

It’s an incredibly exciting thing, this one, meaningless life of yours.

Define yourself by what you love.

Respect people with less power then you. I don’t care if you’re the most powerful cat in the room, I will judge you on how you treat the least powerful. So there.

Science is not a body of knowledge nor a system of belief; it is just a term which describes humankind’s incremental acquisition of understanding through observation. Science is awesome.

If anyone can show me one example in the history of the world of a single spiritual person who has been able to show either empirically or logically the existence of a higher power with any consciousness or interest in the human race or ability to punish or reward humans for their moral choices or that there is any reason other than fear to believe in any version of an afterlife, I will give you my piano, one of my legs and my wife.

A genius is a mentally ill person with an audience