1.
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.
Dylan Moran
2.
People will kill you over time, and how they'll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases, like 'be realistic.'
Dylan Moran
3.
Money can't buy you love, but it can get you some really good chocolate ginger biscuits.
Dylan Moran
4.
You're talking to a modern, nice, affable German person and they're saying to you something like 'You know, vell, it's a critical time now for Germany within Europe, also globally, economically ve are pretty good, ve have been better. But ve are very vibrant in the theater and arts...' and all the time you'll be listening to this, you're thinking Mmm, yeah, mmm... Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler.
Dylan Moran
5.
Religion is the yeast of death cakes. It is the most awful agent on a vulnerable mind. It's the refuge of alienated and lonely people. It's what people had before television. It yokes people together into an imaginary world. It is just people talking to their imaginary friends, at length. I wouldn't mind, but some of the people are world leaders.
Dylan Moran
6.
Black Books adheres to a more old fashioned, traditional sitcom format, which I think works, because in its own way, it's quite theatrical.
Dylan Moran
7.
You’re not an adult at all - you're just a tall child holding a beer, having conversations you don't understand...
Dylan Moran
8.
Everybody does that now. We all take pics... you do the same with holiday photos. You record something to look back on it, even though you’re not really there when you’re taking the picture 'cause you’re too busy recording it; so you retrospectively go to look back on where you weren’t and tell yourself you had a good time.
Dylan Moran
9.
You've a very important, early decision to make in your life: are you going to be alone, or are you going to be with somebody else? Are you going to be sane, or not lonely? A couple is a strange thing; it's an organism that's half as intelligent as the most intelligent member. And you both know who it is!
Dylan Moran
10.
Don't do it! Stay away from your potential. You'll mess it up, it's potential, leave it. Anyway, it's like your bank balance - you always have a lot less than you think.
Dylan Moran
11.
I'm quite a compulsive person-I only worked this out recently - I'm compulsive, but I'm also very indecisive. I don't know what I want, but I know that I want it now.
Dylan Moran
12.
Oh how I hate you. I hate you so much it gives me energy. I have to get up early in the morning just to hate you, because there's not enough time in the day! Please GO AWAY!
Dylan Moran
13.
I used to live with two other guys. We used to cook two things. The first one was called 'cheese... thing' and that was where you get something and you melt cheese over it and the first one to guess what it is doesn't have to wash up. That's obviously quite Mediterranean; the other one was less complex. It was just called 'cheese fantasy.' That's where you come in, very drunk, at about five in the morning and find an apple and just pretend there's some cheese on it.
Dylan Moran
14.
I don't do drugs. If I want a rush I just stand up when I'm not expecting it.
Dylan Moran
15.
I don't mind most religious people, I talk to them. I listen to them, you know, banging on. "I prayed very hard and then the fairy came." "Did he? Good. Have a biscuit." I only get annoyed when they try and make me see the fairy. "You have to let the fairy into your heart." Look, I wouldn't let him into my garden, okay? I'd shoot him on sight, if he existed, which he doesn't. Now have another biccie and be quiet, will you please?
Dylan Moran
16.
I think you should, yeah. You should wash your beard, then shave it off, nail it to a Frisbee and fling it over a rainbow.
Dylan Moran
17.
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.
Dylan Moran
18.
I think a lot of the time you just parody yourself.
Dylan Moran
19.
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.
Dylan Moran
20.
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.
Dylan Moran
21.
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.
Dylan Moran
22.
Nothing can make me feel better now, except cocaine.
Dylan Moran
23.
It's easy to smile when you have a squirrel's intellect.
Dylan Moran
24.
Fruit... it's just God showing off. "Look at all the colours I know!"
Dylan Moran
25.
I'm actually about as famous as a fourth division footballer from the 70s.
Dylan Moran
26.
You know, just sometimes, in between the first cigarette with coffee in the morning to that four hundredth glass of cornershop piss at 3am, you do sometimes look at yourself and think...This is fantastic. I'm in heaven.
Dylan Moran
27.
It's such a bullshit move. Transparently so. It's obviously supposed to give succor to people who feel pissed off because someone from another country got a job that they feel should've been given to them. But that's what people voted against here. They voted against the movement of labor - that kind of fluidity - because they want a Britain that no longer exists, and they can't get it.
Dylan Moran
28.
Why do I even dare to think I could dream I could imagine I could hope?!
Dylan Moran
29.
Women are like canoes, full of soup. At first everyone is suspicious but then everyone wants one.
Dylan Moran
30.
People who get implants, it's so depressing, you know... People - I don't know. The route of that, you know, maybe they want more love or attention, or what it is, but they always go for the most obvious place, you know? Here... Well if you really want more attention, why not get them in your eyes? And then move your eyes down to where your nipples used to be, put your breasts up on your head, everybody will pay attention!
Dylan Moran
31.
And yet, people still turn to Jesus. You will notice though that the kind of people who turn to Jesus tend to be the sort of people who haven't done that well with everybody else.
Dylan Moran
32.
I need a healthy injection of cynicism right now.
Dylan Moran
33.
I was fat! I was pustule-rich! I looked like a pink human grenade! When did I blossom into the irresistible little orchid that I am now? I don't know. Getting taller helps. It spreads out a bit.
Dylan Moran
34.
I quite fancy the 1940s. I like the trams and the trousers.
Dylan Moran
35.
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.
Dylan Moran
36.
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.
Dylan Moran
37.
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.
Dylan Moran
38.
I've seen stand up comedy, and after a while you start to notice that a lot of people are doing things that are like a lot of other people. There can be a bit of a herd mentality, and that's obviously less interesting because there's less going on. I'm just being totally frank with you.
Dylan Moran
39.
I find it incredibly boring when people are mean about some individuals, especially if the individual has no power. I can understand how someone deems it necessary if somebody is in power to tear them down - I think that's really crucial. I make a lot of mean jokes about myself; as a theme, suffering seems to me a very interesting thing for comedy, but not the suffering of a particular individual.
Dylan Moran
40.
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.
Dylan Moran
41.
I don't want to do the same thing over and over again.
Dylan Moran
42.
I don't see teenagers anymore. I see... I see youths. Slumped S shapes in their hoodies, all huddled round a bin of burning grannies. All texting eachother because they've given up on speech.
Dylan Moran
43.
Eggs! They're not a food, they belong in no group! They're just farts clothed in substance!
Dylan Moran
44.
Of course people are angry. Generation upon generation had jobs at steel mills or whatever - things were going on and it looked like it would always be that way. And then there's these cataclysmic changes and people find themselves out on their arse and they're angry and they want answers. But one thing that's for sure is that those answers will not come in the form of Donald J. Trump.
Dylan Moran
45.
Vodka is a very deceptive drink, because you drink it and you think, "What is this? This is pointless! It's - you can't taste it, you can't smell it... Why did we waste our money on this, bloody - why are we on a traffic island?"
Dylan Moran
46.
I dislike both of [candidates] but there's obviously no choice in the election - if you're concerned about the future of anything, you need to vote for Hillary Clinton.
Dylan Moran
47.
You learn very very quickly that it is mostly about swearing, actually. That's all you're doing, swearing, in a box with wheels.
Dylan Moran
48.
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.
Dylan Moran
49.
Vodka! That's a child's drink, why am I drinking this stupid drink, oh and why am I on a traffic island?
Dylan Moran
50.
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.
Dylan Moran