One thing that’s coming up a lot is: are you as grumpy as you appear from this Black Books thing. – Dylan Moran
You have to assume that you’re talking to the most intelligent, tuned-in audience you could ever get. That’s the way you’re going to get the best out of people. Whether they know you or not shouldn’t matter for comedy. They should get to know you pretty quickly. and they should be having a good time pretty quickly. – Dylan Moran
You know, people sometimes say to me, ‘Do you prefer to do this or that, act or do stand-up or write’ but the thing that I enjoy most is the difference between all of them, because you’re always learning. I don’t go around thinking of myself as a great anything. I’m actually lucky to have the chance to fail at all of them. – Dylan Moran
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. – Dylan Moran
I’m fascinated by how you’ll change your position so many times over a lifetime, but really what you’re doing is occupying a series of positions on a landscape. – Dylan Moran
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. – Dylan Moran
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. – Dylan Moran
You’re not going to learn anything if you’re not prepared to go flat, so I’m very happy to go flat. – Dylan Moran
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. – Dylan Moran
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. – Dylan Moran
People will kill you over time, and how they’ll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases, like ‘be realistic.’ – Dylan Moran
You can’t please everyone, nor should you seek to, because then you won’t please anyone, least of all yourself. – Dylan Moran
I have no qualifications to do anything else and there weren’t any formal application forms you had to fill in for stand-up, so I thought I’d give that a twist. – Dylan Moran
I don’t watch a whole lot of stand up. Mainly I prefer to read writers; they make me laugh the most. Something gets you when you’re alone and someone’s voice is coming through their work. There’s a different quality to it that stays with you a bit more. – Dylan Moran
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. – Dylan Moran
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
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
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. – Dylan Moran
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
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
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. – Dylan Moran
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. – Dylan Moran
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. – Dylan Moran
Maybe this is just me, but as time goes by, I’m more bewildered by modernity. It gets more unfathomable with every passing year. – Dylan Moran
