All Quotes

"His name changed from Gerry Dorsey to Engelbert Humperdinck. I mean, I just wanted to be in the room when they were working that one through: "Zingelbert Bembledack! Yingybert Dambleban! Zangelbert Bingledack! Wingelbert Humptyback! … Slut Bunwalla!" "What?!" "All right, Kringelbert Fishtybuns! Steviebuns Bottrittrundle –" "No, Gerry Dorsey! I like Gerry Dorsey!" "No, we can't, who we got? Zingelbert Bembledack, Tringelbert Wangledack, Slut Bunwalla, Klingybun Fistelvase, Dindlebert Zindledack, Gerry Dorsey, Engelbert Humptyback, Zengelbert Bingledack, Engelbert Humperdinck, Vingelbert Wingledanck –" "No, no, go back one!""

"I had to chat up girls, and I'd only tagged them before. I didn't have the verbal power to be able to say, "Susan, I saw you in the classroom today. As the sun came from behind the clouds, a burst of brilliant light caught your hair, it was haloed in front of me. You turned, your eyes flashed fire into my soul, I immediately read the words of Dostoevsky and Karl Marx, and in the words of Albert Schweitzer, 'I fancy you.' " But no! At 13, you're just going, " 'Ello, Sue. I saw you in the room... I've got legs, have you? Oh yeah... Do you like bread? I've got a French loaf. [mimes smacking her with the loaf and dashing off] Bye! (I love you!)""

"(Talking about American and British Language) You say 'erbs and we say herbs, because there's a fucking 'H' in it."

"I can have fantastic conversations with women about clothing and make-up, the external areas of girliedom, because I completely share their interest in it. So I have the fun, sexy, let's-go-dress-up part of being a woman in me but not the rest."

"I don't do drag [...] Drag is about glamour, pearls, wigs, sequins and that's not where I am. What I am doing is much edgier."

"[On the aim of his exercise routine] Lean and lithe are the two places I am trying to get to. Seeing as I am fairly blokey-looking, with a broad chest, if I am going to get into what people consider girls' clothing, I need to go for lean in the torso department."

"What I want people to understand is this isn't an act. This is an intrinsic part of who I am. I wear girlie stuff on the street, not just on stage."

"That's how I see my audience, a surrogate affection machine. It doesn't necessarily have to be comedy, either. It could be drama or music, anything where you want that love back."

"[On coming out on stage] My first joke at that gig was, 'If you're a stand-up, it's good to be a minority because then you've got something to rail against. If you're black, you can rail against white supremacists; if you're poor, you can rail against the rich. But if you're a white, male, middle-class stand-up, it's shit. So thank God I'm a transvestite.' It went down a storm."

"I was walking past a building site in Liverpool and a brickie shouted at me from the scaffolding, 'Hey Eddie, where's your lippie?' I said I'd left it at home, and he replied: 'Wanna borrow mine?' Moments like that make everything worthwhile."

"If you're going up for a Hollywood film, you'd better stay in boy mode because producers don't have wild imaginations."

"[On fully transitioning to being a woman via surgery] If I looked beautiful, like Julian Clary, then maybe I would do it. But the way I look, everyone would know I was a bloke who had had a sex change. Besides, it would confuse things because I like girls."

"The Crusades were, "We kill you in the name of Jesus!" "Wait, we have Jesus, too! He's a prophet in our religion! We kill you in the name of Jesus!" "Do you? … Well, we kill you for your dark skin, for Jesus was a white man from Oxford!" "No, he wasn't! He was from Judea! Dark-skinned man, such as we!" "… Really? Look, we've come all this way. Would you mind awfully if we hacked you to bits? Just for the press back home.""

"Pope Pius XII was meant to go and castigate Hitler for being a [air quotes] "Genocidal Fuckhead … [air quotes again] with bunny rabbit ears". But he didn't, he wimped out, and for that history has renamed that Pope as "Pope Gutless Bastard I.""

"There's 200,000 gods in Hinduism … and they've got gods like Shiva, the God of Creation and Destruction. Which is a good god to be, 'cause you can go *whoom* [creates thing] "What do you think? Do you like that? You don't like that?" *whoom* [destroys thing] If you're just the God of Creation, you're going *whoom* "Do you like that? You don't? All right, I'll put it in the garage … shit, I haven't got a garage!" *whoom* [creates garage]"

"Makeup's just crazy, anyways. Native Americans used to wear it, and it did all right for them until, uh … well, until you killed them all, I suppose."

"List of films (M–O)"

"List of films (P–S)"

"List of films (T–V)"

"List of films (W–Z)"

"Fortunate those who, born before science, were privileged to die of their first disease!"

"Two enemies — the same man divided."

"When I happen to be busy, I never give a moment's thought to the "meaning" of anything, particularly of whatever it is I am doing. A proof that the secret of everything is in action and not abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness."

"We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything."

"The more you are a victim of contradictory impulses, the less you know which to yield to. To lack character — precisely that and nothing more."

"Self-knowledge — the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?"

"This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique — and insignificant."

"In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy."

"Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that we alone pursue the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear."

""Do I look like someone who has something to do here on Earth?" — That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities."

"Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?"

"In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left...with a foolish grin."

"Even more than in a poem, it is the aphorism that the word is god."

"If death is as horrible as is claimed, how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time we consider happy any being, friend or enemy, who has ceased to live?"

"The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?"

"Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough."

"What do you do from morning to night?" "I endure myself."

"The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich."

"Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations."

"I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass — which is better than trying to fill them."

"Say what we will, death is the best thing nature has found to please everyone. With each of us, everything vanishes, everything stops forever. What an advantage, what an abuse! Without the least effort on our part, we own the universe, we drag it into our own disappearance. No doubt about it, dying is immoral..."

"The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla."

"No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive."

"We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly."

"Nothing deserves to be undone, doubtless because nothing deserved to be done."

"Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh."

"The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived."

""What's wrong — what's the matter with you?" Nothing, nothing's the matter, I've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don't know where to turn, what to run for..."

"Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach."

"Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser."