Words matter. These are the best Dylan Moran Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
A lot of the fiction I read growing up was post-war American, and not all of it centers on Manhattan, but around people of the Mad Men generation, people like John Cheever and, in more modern times, Don DeLillo, who I always mention.
I’m actually about as famous as a fourth division footballer from the 70s.
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.
As an Irish person, there’s a historical fascination with America: America is the default green and promised land for Irish people and Italians; that’s what we grow up with.
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.
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 really can’t describe what my stand-up is like – people see it and they say it’s like that, or it’s like this, and that’s really up to them, that’s fine, but I don’t sit around all day analysing it. I just try and enjoy a show and interest myself because if I don’t do that then I won’t interest anybody else.
Black Books adheres to a more old fashioned, traditional sitcom format, which I think works, because in its own way, it’s quite theatrical.
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 the same thing over and over again.
I’m Irish, yeah, but I don’t need to get up on a soapbox about it.
I do not walk around imaging myself to be intimidating or smart.
I’m organised in some ways, but not in others.
The terror of failure can make you feel like a failure. So a bunch of people think you’re not very good at your thing. How much do you invest in what they say? How much do you care? Failure is not putting yourself on the line.
Children are the most honest critics. They will say ‘You’re funny’, but also ‘You’re pathetic – go away.’
When I was young, all the politicians looked like ancient Latin teachers or greengrocers. They were mumbly, stumbly men with their hair blowing in their eyes, walking into trees, opening the wrong door. They had no idea how to present themselves.
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 think a lot of the time you just parody yourself.
My drive to put myself on the line comes from boredom. From that feeling when you go to bed and think, ‘What did I do today?’ It doesn’t have to be something monumental, just a feeling that you really tried to look at something, or look into something.
Paper acts as an eraser on the mind, as soon as you look at what you’ve written.
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.
Lots of comics try stuff out all year round, which is very sensible – I don’t.
It probably says something really clinically terrible about my character that I need to get up on a stage and go ‘Ra ra ra’ in front of people.
I quite fancy the 1940s. I like the trams and the trousers.
I don’t really think of myself as an actor.
I’ve been writing since I was very young, even before I was a teenager. As far as I’m concerned, I am a writer – whether my writing’s spoken or written in a blog, paper, book or printed on the side of a submarine.
I would never really analyse what I do. I leave that to other people – I’m not a critic. I just want to get on with whatever I have in hand, you know? Just try to make the best job of the available material.
The measure of a conversation is how much mutual recognition there is in it; how much shared there is in it. If you’re talking about what’s in your own head, or without thought to what people looking and listening will feel, you might as well be in a room talking to yourself.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you’re a comic, you don’t have a rehearsal room, you rehearse on stage. My main concern is remembering everything.
You’re not going to learn anything if you’re not prepared to go flat, so I’m very happy to go flat.
I’m just a guy who happens to work in public from time to time. I’ve built a reputation as an established comic, not as a celebrity – a celebrity is someone who is famous but doesn’t do anything.
I don’t go to different countries to criticise their political system and tell them what they should be doing – what do I know?
I fear we might be losing the basic human facility to be alone – and with that you throw out independent decision-making, what to trust, what not to trust; key stuff – a perilous loss.
You can’t please everyone, nor should you seek to, because then you won’t please anyone, least of all yourself.
Maybe this is just me, but as time goes by, I’m more bewildered by modernity. It gets more unfathomable with every passing year.
I actually very rarely see comedy myself, and although I admire the work of some comics, it does come from all over, so I’ll get a charge out of some fiction writers and poets.
I get a phone call once every 18 months from some mad person who wants me to do something for less than no money and they give me about a week’s notice. That’s my film career, most of the time.
I thought The Office was good, though I didn’t think of it as a sitcom, just as a very good programme.
I’m really not big on nationalism, to be honest with you. I really don’t think it gets people anywhere except near a pile of dead bodies. I’m Irish, yeah, but I don’t need to get up on a soapbox about it.
Stand-up came naturally to me because people in Ireland talk. But that’s not talking on panel shows; it is structured fun. It reminds me of some tragic aunt clapping her hands and bouncing into a room and announcing we should all play games… and if we don’t we are all a rotten spoilsport.
In the same way, there is some creature gnawing away inside of me, urging me to do things in different ways.
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.
I did throw a lot of eggs into one basket, as you do in your teenage years – ‘I am buying these records, I am wearing this’. I did quite a bit of that. You have to do it, wear your stupid shoes, wear your stupid hair.
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.
Yeah, I think Michael has had to deal with that label of being Michael Caine for a long time.
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.
The truth is that I’m constitutionally incapable of doing an ordinary job.
I was very into New Order, Joy Division, all of that when I was younger. I had a lot of bootlegs that I saved up my pocket money to buy. I had all the obscure early EPs.
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 achieve the surreal jokes through the realism by making it elastic.