Top 100 Billy Connolly Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Even though everybody knows that when you light up a cigarette God takes an hour off your life and gives it to Keith Richards.”

— Billy Connolly

52. “I am totally, absolutely romantic. When I broke up with a girl I would listen to the most heart-breaking music and make it worse. That’s what girls do. I think I am a girl really.”

— Billy Connolly

53. “Killing a guy and stealing his wife and child isn’t too nice a thing to do.”

— Billy Connolly

54. “I don’t aim to offend.”

— Billy Connolly

55. “Try to live in a place you like.”

— Billy Connolly

56. “Why do they call it an asteroid when it’s outside the hemisphere, but call it a haemorrhoid when it’s on the outside of your ass?”

— Billy Connolly

57. “There is this viewpoint that if you have come from the working class you have come from nothing, whereas the middle and upper classes are something, and I don’t hold with that opinion. I think the working class is something. It is everything. They are the builders of society, and without them the whole house falls down.”

— Billy Connolly

58. “Scotland has the only football team in the world that does a lap of disgrace.”

— Billy Connolly

59. “So, have you heard about the oyster who went to a disco and pulled a mussel?”

— Billy Connolly

60. “Once you become successful, people know where you live, the type of house you live in, the kind of car you drive, the clothes you wear, and so it would be patronising to go and talk like a welder. Welding’s a mystery to me now. You can’t go back, your life changes every day.”

— Billy Connolly

61. “I became a welder. I was actually becoming an Engineer and I joined the wrong queue. And so I became a welder, without knowing what a welder was.”

— Billy Connolly

62. “I’m a citizen of the world. I like it that way. The world’s a wonderful. I just think that some people are pretty badly represented. But when you speak to the people themselves they’re delightful. They all want so little.”

— Billy Connolly

63. “I was brought up a Catholic, for that you get an A level in guilt.”

— Billy Connolly

64. “Tread gently on anyone who looks at you sideways.”

— Billy Connolly

65. “I can’t believe in Christianity, but I think Jesus was a wonderful teacher.”

— Billy Connolly

66. “I’d always been scared of people with tertiary education and high intellects in case they found me wanting. I thought they viewed me as just a welder who knew a few jokes.”

— Billy Connolly

67. “I’ve always been fascinated by the difference between the jokes you can tell your friends but you can’t tell to an audience. There’s a fine line you have to tread because you don’t know who is out there in the auditorium. A lot of people are too easily offended.”

— Billy Connolly

68. “If you don’t know how to meditate at least try to spend some time every day just sitting.”

— Billy Connolly

69. “Honestly some folk will take offence at anything, I met a bloke with no legs this morning while at the bus stop, all I asked was “How are you getting on?””

— Billy Connolly

70. “I used to have Mad Cow’s disease, but I’m alright Nooooooooow.”

— Billy Connolly

71. “When you involved in an accident and someone asks “are you alright?” Yes fine thanks, I’ll just pick up my limbs and be off.”

— Billy Connolly

72. “Save the Trees? Trees are the main cause of Forest Fires!”

— Billy Connolly

73. “When you’re eating something and someone asks ‘Is that nice?’ No it’s really revolting – I always eat stuff I hate.”

— Billy Connolly

74. “Ally MacLeod thinks that tactics are a new kind of mint.”

— Billy Connolly

75. “People who announce they are going to the toilet. Thanks that’s an image I really didn’t need.”

— Billy Connolly

76. “I started to draw desert islands. They were just rough, shapes in the middle of the page. Then I began drawing shapes within those shapes and I was amazed how quickly the islands got better. It took off from there.”

— Billy Connolly

77. “I just believe in the movie. I don’t care what the book was like. I don’t care what the previous film was like or other films were like. I care only about the script I’ve got.”

— Billy Connolly

78. “On George W Bush: That man sits at that desk in the White House with the button that can end the world. My father’s younger than him and we don’t give him the controls for the television.”

— Billy Connolly

79. “I don’t understand art-speak. My pictures are big doodles. I’m amazed what people come up with when they look at them. There’s one of a figure with two heads that somebody thought must be a comment on the state of matrimony. None of it is a comment on anything.”

— Billy Connolly

80. “What always staggers me is that when people blow their noses, they always look into their hankies to see what came out. What do they expect to find?”

— Billy Connolly

81. “Behind the proscenium arch, you can’t always hear what people in the audience are saying.”

— Billy Connolly

82. “I set out to be a cross between Lenny Bruce and Robert the Bruce – my main thrust was the body and its functions and malfunctions – the absurdity of the thing.”

— Billy Connolly

83. “Did your mother never tell you not to drink on an empty head?”

— Billy Connolly

84. “I like Dali and Magritte. I also like the Scottish artist John Byrne, another surrealist.”

— Billy Connolly

85. “Without arts programmes there’s only reality TV, and reality TV needs the arts to show it what reality is.”

— Billy Connolly

86. “As soon as I got successful, the Scottish press started picking on me. It’s something they reserve just for me.”

— Billy Connolly

87. “Learn to feel sorry for music because, although it is the international language, it has no swear words.”

— Billy Connolly

88. “The only time I would like to see was the 20s and 30s in America because I love the music and the style and the optimism, I wanted to see New York being built. I wanted to see all that, you know.”

— Billy Connolly

89. “The world needs more Edwin Morgans, people who can take the language and swing it round their heads and don’t care what you think.”

— Billy Connolly

90. “I’m one of the school of people who don’t do research of the reality of the thing or the unreality of the thing. In all the movies I’ve done, I’ve never done any research.”

— Billy Connolly

91. “I always look skint. When I buy a Big Issue, people take it out of my hand and give me a pound.”

— Billy Connolly

92. “Fame is being asked to sign your autograph on the back of a cigarette packet.”

— Billy Connolly

93. “I’m not going to throw away the hand of friendship to suit 100 Trotskyites in Glasgow.”

— Billy Connolly

94. “Nothing means anything here. When they pull down an outstanding building, no one objects. Oh, maybe there’s a wee protest from some collectors or something who take a picture of it before it vanishes.”

— Billy Connolly

95. “The strangest thing is at tea breaks, or coffee breaks or lunch, you forget you’re a zombie. And you’re talking about politics to somebody at the table and you forget that you have a bullet hole in your forehead.”

— Billy Connolly

96. “I don’t have wild dogs chasing people with scripts away from my door. I get my share. I’ve done okay. But I usually do independent stuff because that’s mostly what I’m offered.”

— Billy Connolly

97. “Paddy was in the delivery room when the midwife handed him a black baby. “Is this yours?” she asked “probably” said Paddy “she burns everything else””

— Billy Connolly

98. “I think my securities far outweigh my insecurities. I am not nearly as afraid of myself and my imagination as I used to be.”

— Billy Connolly

99. “I loved Japan. I used to read a lot about it when I was a child. And I always wanted to go. And it was delightful. I absolutely loved it. What a smashing place.”

— Billy Connolly

100. “I spent the whole time battering people I liked and singing with my arm round people I loathed.”

— Billy Connolly