Dylan Moran

"And women as a group, en masse, do show contempt for men, en masse... as a group, you hear a lot of contempt for men: "Oh look! Look at them, look! There they go! One of them's trying to DO something"."

"We end up back with each other. There’s nowhere else to go. People! 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! ‘Cause you’ve got two people walking around together all the time trying to remember all the different shit they have to lie about to each other!"

"Children are very overprotected now, in lots of ways. We're very nervous about them. You know, people go, "Don't go outside! Or inside! Get into the cupboard with some spinach!" When I was a child they'd kick you out and you weren't expected to come back until there were bats!"

"Like when you watch young people on the street and they’re talking. And doing those handshakes that take three quarters of an hour, with the amazingly younger language: “Yeah, yo, dawg, kicking back with the chill, rad.” WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? WHY CAN’T YOU JUST SAY HELLO?"

"The first half of your life is spent getting over yourself. You think you’re amazing, unique. Young people walk around going, "You know the funny thing is I was just in the kitchen but now I’m here in the bedroom, get a load of me! I just go on and on!" And that’s around the age when you meet somebody else – when you’re totally unbearable. Two young, fit, healthy attractive people in love? There’s nothing worse to look at in the world! Going around going, "I can’t believe I met you cause you’re amazing and I’m amazing and we’re surrounded by shitheads, it’s just amazing! Hey, I know this really good bar, let’s go and make it better." In the second half of your life you realise how like every other hump who drew breath you really are. Except you’re MORE boring."

"People will kill you. Over time. They will shave out every last morsel of fun in you with little, harmless sounding phrases that people uses every day, like: "Be realistic!"[...] You never hear someone go "Be realistic! Let me oil you.""

"Adulthood feels like walking around in the desert with a bag over your head, being bumped into by people who rob you as they bore you."

"Would you please - stop - taking - pictures - on your tiny - annoying (whispering) fucking camera. This is happening to you in real time, you are having the experience. It's not much point to verify that you were at the event when you're actually here."

"You ask women, “You know how painful is it? What are talking about here?” And you don’t get an answer, you get anger...and it always starts with the melon...“IMAGINE A MELON!...COMING THROUGH YOUR FACE!...fuckin' stay there, I’ll get a melon!”"

"It's not even a drink. It's a way for having the cops around without using a phone."

"Here your Prime Minister has an approval rating of 75%... which is- What's he doing? Nobody ever gets 75%, is he coming round at night, with a pot roast, touching you on the knee and telling you that you’ve lost weight? What’s going on?! This is madness, nobody gets 75% not even when you’re madly in love with somebody, and you’re fucking each other’s brains out do you give each other 75%! You’ve got to hold a bit back, keep the other person guessing you know? ...keep it at a steady 40..."

"Or Berlusconi, in Italy, right; the envy of the world, Italy, in terms of history, art and culture, 98 different political parties, and they still managed to elect him! He’s so fucking crooked he sleeps on a spiral staircase! So thoroughly corrupt, every time he smiles an angel gets gonorrhoea! He's had so many face-lifts, his face has moved to the top of his head, you have to get on a step-ladder to watch him lie!"

"And we all think that we’re very rational and very secular, but we make gods all the time. Everybody went apeshit when Barack Obama got elected. I was delighted. Everybody was thrilled: a sane, rational, intelligent human being in an important office. Great! But his biggest problem is everybody else! Is us! ‘Cause everybody’s in love with him! He stands up there - he’s very convincing and commanding and makes sense - he says: "It’s a difficult time, everyone needs to work together and be realistic about what we need to do..", and all that stuff - and everbody’s looking at him going: "NO! You do it! You’re SUPER JESUS. You’re so handsome when you’re serious. Do you work out?""

"We need to believe something, and you’re not allowed to believe in religion… Well, you can, but people will laugh at you and throw things. ‘Cause it was just sort of decided in the 20th century that religion is basically a formalized panic about death. Look at the Catholic church, the campest organization on the planet with the purple robes, gold bits on the side, jewellery so big if they let it fall it would kill people... What else can it be, but this sort of ritual of panic about death? “DEATH IS COMING! Quick, put on the gold hat!”"

"You see, people never really grow up. 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? But you can absolutely understand the desire to believe in something, to support you. Children like to be supervised by adults. That’s why children go, “look, no hands” or “look, I can do this” or “I’m really good at this”. Whatever it is. Because it validates them, it shows them that they are there, that somebody else is watching over them. Grown-ups are the same, not that there is any such thing as a grown-up, really. They liked to be watched by something. Because the planet’s not gonna miss us, when we’ve finished fucking it up and killing each other. So we needed the idea of God to have somebody to miss us, or at least notice that we weren’t there anymore."

"A couple of days ago I saw one of those signs outside of churches and it said "Jesus said: I am the light of the world". Which is a very male view, you know, if Jesus had been Jesusina it would've been more modest. You know because it's a women, she would've been traditionally more modest. Jesusina would've gone: "Well I'm quite bright"."

"So, yes, death. When you're young, you think about it… Well, you don't really think about it, you know - you have the intelligence of raspberry jam, you're not thinking about anything. But it's there, as a motive force, making you do things. Go and get a job. Go and find a flat. Find somebody else. Put them in the flat. Make them stay. Get a toaster. Go to work. Get on the bus. Look at your boss. Say, "fuck". Sit down. Pick up the thing. Go blank. Scream internally. Go home. Listen to the radio. Look at the other person. Think, "WHY? Why did this happen?" Go to bed. Lie awake! At night! Get up. Feel groggy. Put the things on - your clothes - whatever they're called. Go out the door, into work - same thing! Same people, again, it's real, it is happening, to you. Go home again! Sit, Radio, Dinner - mmm, GARDENING, GARDENING, GARDENING, death. And so, the young woman thinks that if she has the right curtains, she can keep death and all other problems at bay. But the young man knows that the only way to keep death at bay, is by having sex pretty much constantly. Now, because nature's so clever, it makes the couple compromise by giving them children, so they never have to have sex again, and then the children pull the curtains down so there was NEVER anything to worry about in the first place!"

"The other morning, I woke up. I was frightened – I’m always frightened in the morning, I don’t know where I am. But I heard this beautiful reassuring sound, it sounded like my childhood. I thought, what’s that? Is it? Church bells behind the hill? Or, no – it’s an ice cream van, in the rain. It was me, BREATHING!"

"You should be as alive as you can, until you're totally dead!"

"Science is a joke. Look at the scientific explanation for the origin of life as we know it. No wonder we have creationists, you know, those people - God love them - who tell their children that, you know, originally we all went to school with dinosaurs, or whatever it is that they tell them. But no wonder they exist, because listen to the explanation for the origin of life itself - it doesn’t sound very scientific. "There was a big BANG! And then we all came from monkeys." "What? That’s it?" "Yeah, shop's closed, fuck off!" I need more than that! There must be more than - BANG! *monkey sounds* "Honey I’m home!" - come on! It’s such a boring theory, anyway! It’s much more interesting if you reverse the order."

"You know, people come in here with their fucking camera phones - everything’s a camera nowadays; you pick up a piece of fruit, it takes a picture of you. Or the computers which are everywhere which is proof that we like to be watched. That what we’ve replaced God with, technology! We’re fucking afraid to be alone, in a lift, in a taxi cab, we need cameras everywhere recording us unless we realise we’re alone, we might do something scary... like whimper, I don’t know!"

"Perfume is a good example of a product gone all wrong. When I was a child, it was a semi-exotic thing and it was called something stupid like "Fleur de Fleur" and you would give it to your mother or aunty at Christmas and it was advertised by some dopey looking woman in a field of sunflowers and she looked like she'd been hit by a tractor because she was going *flails with arms*. She couldn’t just get over how nice she smelled. Now, because we’re so jaded, we’ve consumed so much, our attention can only be grabbed in a violent way. So it’s always advertised by these constipated, exo-keletal bitches who are sneering at you and it’s called something horrible like "Homicide"! "Dysentery"! "Urban Dysentery" for boys and girls!"

"WHAT'S WRONG WITH US?! We're the only organism the planet is actively asking to fuck off! By burning things, and freezing things, and melting things on us! It's like going past the ocean and seeing it spit out whales, "Fuck off, I've had enough of you!" Passing the eucalyptus tree as the koalas hang on, the tree's going [Swaying violenty] "Get - the fuck - away - from me!""

"These fingers are from Florence. Yves Saint Laurent himself designed my arse. My nipples are reconstructed from an early unfinished blue print by Coco Chanel, hence their lopsided charm. One of them is on my shoulder. The other five I keep handily between my toes, which, in themselves are a bit embarrassing. But fuck it, it was the 80’s, you had to have suede."

"Young people, should be allowed to go up to one another and say “Hi” and that’s it – they go off and do something wonderfully stupid together...like have a gap year, there’s no other justification for that as far as I can see. What do young people have gap years for? They haven’t done anything yet! Why don’t they have a full year, where they do 9 times as much work as they’ve ever done in their life to prepare them for what the rest of adult hood feels like - which wandering around a desert, with a bag over your head, being bumped into by people who rob you as they bore you."

"You know, fucking mornings! What is that about? That time is a huge lie. "Get up, get up! We’re going to be late! Quickly! Late, imagine it! The disaster if we’re late! What’ll happen if we’re late? I can’t even bear to think about it!" Late is an idea. Late is bullshit. It doesn’t matter how fucking late you are, you can turn up in your pyjamas scratching your nuts with a fork, the same old shit’s gonna be there. It’s a lie! People running up to you saying, "what do you think?" in the morning! "What do you think?"! "Think? Think?! I’m not even fucking breathing, go away with your 'think'!" It takes you three quarters of an hour to find your face and apologise to it. And how do they lure you back into the world, into the human race, into consciousness itself? With the great traditional breakfast! As eaten here and in Britain and Ireland and lots of other places: Fried slices of dead pig, tubes of dead pig, some fungus and a chicken's period on a plate, "WELCOME BACK! WE MISSED YOU WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING! ENJOY!" Of course you can always have the healthy option, of course you can, of course you can!... Some yummy cereal, mmhmmmm dust with milk! Says it right there on the box in big primary coloured letters ‘contains fibre’. Goody gumdrops, I was up all night fantasizing about fucking fibre. You know that feeling when you get a belly full of fibre and you can skip round the room taunting everybody who didn’t get theirs? Remember all those times in your life when you stopped strangers in the street and screamed at them “I need some fibre!""

"- I know what you're thinking!"

"Women are not allowed to be seen to enjoy themselves on lots of ways. They have a test for that in Ireland now, they’ve scientifically perfected that. The Madonna-Whore-Quotient of a woman. You know, if when a woman puts her hand together to pray, and when she’s crying the blood and she levitates and you don’t get a sustained hum in A Flat, she’s a fucking whore!"

"Where is the cake? Cake is the language of love. I don't see any cakes in the building. You know, people say that to you: "I love you, I love you!" Yeah? Gimme a fuckin' eclair."

"The ultimate human shopping list: I’d like some illegal, some forbidden, some frowned upon and some downright disgusting, please. I’ll have that to go, thank you!"

"You have to have a good relationship with pleasure, Australians seem to, on the whole your approach seems to be to go, "What's that? Ahh, yeah, it's one of those" which is a lot healthier than the Irish one, which is to go, "What's that? That looks nice. I'll wait till everyone's asleep, then I'll steal it, so nobody will see me enjoy myself and then I won't have to feel ashamed. I can just let the guilt fester for the rest of my life and spend all my remaining years drunk.""

"- Where are you?"

"And I’ve been on the road for too long, I know I have, because I was in the supermarket the other day, and I saw this tiny, heartbreaking can of beans. And it really made me want to cry. I just thought how old or sick or small do you need to be to need those beans? And it was on a high shelf, you know, you’d be climbing the ladder for days just to get at those four beans."

"And what is the point of putting a picture of the perfectly ordinary Irish smile on the box of cigarettes? what's that all about? what you supposed to achieve?"

"And the thing is woman do have to do all kinds of things themselves. And they lie about it 'cause of all the pressure. Woman go and get their hair made bullet-proof and get the implants. The silly clothes and the stupid shoes everybody wears now. You know these... And they say: "Oh, l enjoy. l did it for me, you know. l like the fact that it takes me 45 minutes to get in or out of a chair." l've always wanted to look like a prawn who's being airlifted. lt's a total lie. That's not the kind of thing a person does for themselves. You know what l did for me? I had an eclair inside an eclair. That's the kind of thing you do for yourself."

"The truth is that women are like chick peas under a psychopath's hat. They can be cherishable and zingy and suprising. But you ask too many questions and you get killed."

"Don’t get feminist on me! Look, I’m not a feminist, 'cause I'm a man. I'm not qualified. I can't be a feminist. Just like most women.. If women were serious about feminism they would have everything that feminists talk about getting. Equal pay, you could have that tomorrow! IF... women would give up bitching about one another for FIVE MINUTES. Which doesn’t seem to be possible."

"If you're a young man, you know, you live in a sexual tyranny anyway and your penis is Kim Jong. Sex decides everything. You can have a car crash. You lie in the ditch thinking: "What is the erotic twist in the situation? I can't quite seem to see it yet"."

"Who sleeps, really? If you’re a proper adult person in the 21st century, how can you relax, at all? Your mind keeps churning. You think, "What if this thing happens?! What if that thing happens?! What if they happen together?! What if I lose my job?! I hate my fucking job! But what if I lose it?" Your mind is a hive of worms. And worms don't live in a hive, so it already feels unnatural. You lie in bed, beside your partner... "What if I died?!" If you don't have a partner, you just think, "What if I died? ...Okay, I would be dead." But if you do have a partner and family, you'd think, "What if I died? How would they cope?" They wouldn't! They would be out in the street in half an hour, stealing food from seagulls mouths! Or worse! They WOULD cope! They'd have a much nicer, cleaner house! And an improved sense of self-worth. Probably more money! And inevitably your partner would find somebody within the first 3-4 days, and begin a tumultuous sexual relationship. They would be having sex a lot in your bed when you were dead! The morning, the afternoon, the evening, and the night time would be the main times they would be having sex, in your bed, when you were dead. Feeding each other lobster with their bare hands, to give each other more energy to try it in new and more demanding ways. When your realise you are lying besides somebody who is waiting for you to die! And what's more, they're sleeping to make the time go faster."

"Days are stupid length. They are just long enough to get regret and then you have to go to bed."

"Scotland, the country where they fry the food five times to make sure it’s dead; the country where they invented bacon flavour mouthwash."

"You laugh at the North, you think they’re all funny little short people who live in a big pie. Trying to sort out their relationship with the definite article. Throwing darts at their dinner."

"Some people don’t like Mr Cameron. Mr Cameron and his cube of air. He doesn’t seem to know where to put that thing down. He can’t find a place for it. I think the reason he can’t get rid of it is because it contains the essence of the Big Society, and nobody wants that shit."

"The belief system that if you smiled hard enough into the face of God, you would eventually shit money."

"You know what you think, you know where you are on the spectrum... You’re Left or you’re Right really, that’s it. And if you’re left-wing, you’re boring. That’s the truth. Nobody wants to hang around with you, you’re very dull. You’re the voice of conscience, y’know the one saying: “Now look. Put it down, we should all be nice to one another. Let’s try and not eat everything today.” Very dull voice... The right-wing... Cruel? Yes. Vicious? Certainly. But honest. Not a sophisticated philosophy, it just says: “What is this? Do we fuck it or eat it? Let’s try half and half.”... Now you might be liberal! You could be, I forgot. You could be one of those thoughtful, troublesome people. People who say: “Well things are actually a little bit like this AND a little bit like that. Soooo, let’s do whatever you say.” If you’re liberal, you have no purpose. You are the thing in your kitchen you never use. Something you bought once, while you were out at a market feeling frisky."

"They tell you, you can get everything you need from pulses and lentils and things like that. Yeah. Everything you need, except company, which is not to be had, because you are dying, bent double in a miasma of your own toxic farts."

"What does anyone think or believe any more? Belief itself is treated with disgust. Belief is now regarded as a kind of fat marbling the brain. Who here believes in organized religion? (NO!) Who doesn't? (AUDIENCE CHEERING LOUDLY) You see? People in the West don't believe in anything! And we're proud of it! "What you believe in?" "Nothing! Nothing!" "What did you have for lunch? I don't fucking believe you!" We don't believe in anything. We treat religion with contempt. Faith. All that rubbish. What are you, a child? Believing in this, you do good and then you know, you die and then you get a biscuit! What are you, a fucking idiot? What's wrong with you? We don't believe in anything! Because we know about science! Believe in science! That's the only thing we know about! The atoms and quarks and things. We don't understand it! Any of it! But... But that's the case. So, that's totally different to having a faith! Isn't it?"

"The dark creates all kinds of things. The dark creates music, particular kinds of music. Horrible folk music you don't want to listen to. And heavy metal which they love in dark places. They love it in Scandinavia. They have all these metal bands, you know? And they're not like the English ones or American ones that have names like Metallica and Megadeth and so on. The names are... 'Cause English isn't their first language in Scandinavia even though they all speak it. So they call their bands things like Anus Hammer, Egg Smuggler, all that stuff. lt's a very interesting look, heavy metal, you know... You have everything down here. You've got jazz and ska and everything, you know. Whatever, folk music, too, probably. Folk music has its own look. lt has a... You know, people wear dungarees 'cause they say, "l'm a man or a woman of the people. This isn't my main thing, you know. l'm just like you really. My main job is harvesting turnips. Anyway, this next number is called Cross-eyed Mary of the Lowlands. l'd like to dedicate it to my wife." And then there's jazz, you know, where you get people in suits but they're non-conformist suits 'cause they're wearing a pink shirt with a green jacket and a blue tie and trousers too complex to describe. 'Cause they're saying, "Yes, l'm wearing a suit but l work for me. And my job is to play the electrified tractor horn till 5:00 in the morning, so fuck you." Heavy metal is a very interesting look. The look is a kind of an argument. lt's an argument against Darwinism. Because what the people who are involved are saying, is that attraction is not necessary for reproduction. That's why they shave all the hair off where it would naturally be and cultivate it in places it shouldn't be. And that's why the music is so angry. You know, if you shave all the hair off your arse and get into a pair of leather trousers, you're gonna sing an angry song. lt's not gonna be some wistful ballad about that crazy summer in Paris with Justine. lt's going to be much more, "Death in the morning, death for breakfast. Little pots of toasted death." Heavy metal is what happens when a group of people with competitively disgusting appearances come together to try to kill air. No, partly... Partly, that is probably age speaking. l just can’t tolerate certain things, you know."

"Why would anybody want to go skiing? You could sit in the comfort of your own kitchen and break your knees with a hammer. What is the human impulse? What’s wrong with these people? I think it’s because they’re so closeted, their lives are so comfortable, they actually seek out danger as a pastime. If you’re poor, you don’t go and look for danger ‘cause you’re surrounded by it. Your accommodation is dangerous, your neighbours are dangerous. Your own family are pretty handy. You probably have a couple of moves yourself. Your dinner can fucking kill you anyway so you don’t have to go and look for danger."

"Now, The Archers is not a programme I’m hugely familiar with, because every time the theme music comes on, I leap across the kitchen with an athleticism I don’t actually possess, in search of the “fuck off” button on the radio. I gather it’s about some people who are very, very worried about getting the crisps to the fete on time. No wonder everybody's hooked."