Top 38 Cockney Quotes & Sayings

There are lots of actors who are posh and stick with that, and there are lots of actors who are cockney, and that's what they do. That's fine, but I don't think that could be said about me.

The sea is masculine, the type of active strength. Look, what egg-shells are drifting all over it, each one, like ours, filled with men in ecstasies of terror, alternating with cockney conceit, as the sea is rough or smooth. Is this sad-colored circle an eternal cemetery?

My parents went through the dictionary looking for a beautiful name, nearly called me Banyan, flicked on a few pages and came to China, which is cockney rhyming slang for mate.

I just wanted to be an ordinary, middle-class person. When I was at Cambridge, I made great efforts to lose the last remnants of my Cockney accent.

One of the main things about Cockney is, you speak at twice the speed as Americans. Americans speak very slow.

You can begin to see an amalgamation of cultures, the real beginning of one world. Ten years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine a Cockney singing group with a Southern Negro style and Indian and electronic music. I wonder if people have even noticed what a tremendous cultural signal the Beatles are.

Slang has always moved this way. From Cockney rhyming slang to codes swapped among highwaymen, they're tribal badges of identity, bonding mechanisms designed to distinguish the initiated, and to keep strangers out.

I love my accent, I thought it was useful in Gone In 60 Seconds because the standard villain is upper class or Cockney. My Northern accent would be an odd clash opposite Nic Cage.

Adele's like a beacon of honesty. Doesn't compromise, goes to America and she's still the same sweary cockney.

I grew up with Jilly and Tamsin driving Volvos. But I wasn't one of them... I always felt more comfortable with Cockney and working-class people. My heroes were the Beatles and people like Michael Caine.

People say I've 'retained' my Cockney accent. I can do any accent, but I wanted other working-class boys to know that they could become actors.

I was able to make up lots of portementos, literally hundreds and hundreds of words... See, I find that mine don't have any meanings. They're not proper. Although I've got a great dictionary of them. It's like the Cockney rhyming slang or something.

I didn't know much about the East End and I didn't go trudging round to research it - couldn't be bothered with all that - but my grandmother was a cockney so I used her voice for Dot. I don't think it sounded very real at the beginning.

We had probably our best ever Player of the Year Dance last week. You elected Dennis Wise as Player of the Year. Dennis accepted his award mimicking Vialli, whereupon Zola shouted 'Speak English', Dennis switched to his normal Cockney voice only for Zola to shout 'You're still not speaking English'.

For people to understand, you can't speak 'cinema.' Cinema doesn't have alphabets, so you have to go to the local language. Even in England, if they make a movie in London they have to make it in the Cockney accent, they can't make a film with the English spoken in the BBC. So cinema has to be realistic to the area that it is set in.

I don't want to say I'll never play someone with a cockney accent, but I think I would be irritated by me doing it.

I just wanted to be an ordinary, middle-class person. When I was at Cambridge I made great efforts to lose the last remnants of my cockney accent.

We must grow out of religion. It is either bugaboo, formalism, or hysteria. Besides, what proof is there that "the churches" know more about "God" than the Cockney sentry on duty outside the camp? We have only their say-so.

I don't speak cockney and I don't pretend to come from that part of the world. For the longest time the English, like the Beatles and so on sounded American. "She loves you yeah yeah yeah!" All of the sudden you sound American. It doesn't work that way with Americans who try to sing English. It's not convincing. If I say "Footy" and "tele" and "Brissy" and "Sydney" and "Simmo" it's not convincing.

The sexy magazine in Britain in that time was called Club International. Club International: It was about as international as the International House of Pancakes. It should have been called Naked Cockney Girls with Scurvy.

I could be a dray man delivering the beer, maybe. If they could wangle some cockney in, that would be great.

It was great to play an ex-marine cockney thug. All my roles are as different as the colours of the rainbow.

Somebody sent me a British magazine listing the 20 worst dialects ever done in movies. I was No. 2, with the worst Cockney accent ever done. No. 1 was Sean Connery, because he uses his Scottish brogue no matter what he's playing.

It's a damn shame we have this immediate ticking off in the mind about how people sound. On the other hand, how many people really want to be operated upon by a surgeon who talks broad cockney?

In England, I was a Cockney actor. In America, I was an actor.

Ever since I saw sexy Beast I've been trying to get the cockney thing down.

I can write a story in working-class Stockholm Swedish, but I'm not going to assume I can perform the same feat with Cockney. I'll focus on adventures in story, themes and structure instead.

Millions who could not follow closely or accurately the main events of the War looked day after day in the papers for the fortunes of Mafeking, and when finally the news of its relief was flashed throughout the world, the streets of London became impassable, and the floods of sterling, cockney patriotism were released in such a deluge of unbridled, delirious joy as was never witnessed again till Armistace Night, 1918.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

I've been acting a long time, and I can play a Cockney gangster or a womanizer in my sleep or standing on my head. But what I try to do is I try to find characters that are as far away from me as I possibly can and then make them real. A French Nazi is about as far away from me as I can possibly get without actually going to Mars or something.

The Crafty Cockney had a picture of the owner dressed up as a copper, so I brought it home, wore it on TV and the name just stuck.

I have always been English, ever since I emigrated from England and since the kids in Canada beat me up at the age of twelve for having an East London Cockney accent. I thank them for the cockney taunts because the beatings turned me on to boxing. But on a serious note Canada has been kind to me.

I don't like John Terry and I never have. He's got funny eyes and he's a cry baby. He's also a Cockney.

I actually had a cockney accent before I went to drama school. It's softened up a bit.

My parents were hippies, and the story is that they went through a dictionary looking for a beautiful word to name me. They nearly called me Banyan, but flipped a few pages on and reached "China," thankfully. The other reason they liked it is that "china" is Cockney rhyming slang for "mate." People say "my old china," meaning "my old mate," because "china plate" rhymes with "mate.

I'm every bourgeois nightmare - a Cockney with intelligence and a million dollars.

Lots of middle class people are running around pretending to be Cockney.

There is a huge fan base, they're very knowledgeable and very loyal. I was astonished - before I started working on the series I didn't know anything about Game of Thrones. I hadn't heard of the books. When it started going out, people were coming up to me in the street saying [fake cockney accent] "oh, Game of Thrones, f------ wonderful.