Top 180 Denis Leary Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “I would have to commit a crime and have cops chase me. That would be the only way to get me to jog five miles.”

— Denis Leary

152. “You know it’s Ash Wednesday? Really? I just thought people suddenly decided to start putting cigarettes out on their foreheads.”

— Denis Leary

153. “You can have good writing, but a great actor will make it feel and sound like great writing. You can have great writing, and mediocre actors will make it feel mediocre. Without the actors, you have nothing.”

— Denis Leary

154. “If a character dies, you get to do a big, juicy death scene. But the flip side is you’re out of the sequel, which is where the real money is.”

— Denis Leary

155. “One of those things that I like about TV is that if you get a group of people you like, you can work with these people for months at a time, and you can discover their strengths and weaknesses, and you can use those in the direction where you take the characters.”

— Denis Leary

156. “I don’t really have a lot of fun playing just straight good guys. It’s not my thing. It’s like Tom Hanks territory.”

— Denis Leary

157. “The key thing is to get that one splash – that one song or that one video for a song – that catches people’s eyes. Because it’s all digital content now.”

— Denis Leary

158. “Because in the end, that’s the only legacy anyone leaves behind: family. How you treated and loved your significant other bears a spiritual witness even after you’ve departed. And if you have children, how they are raised speaks an enduring volume about your moral backbone and beliefs. As do your closest friends and relatives. Charity also counts: To whom much is given, much is expected in return. I picked up that nugget from my parents.”

— Denis Leary

159. “Ann Romney talking about middle class moms is like Chris Christie talking about a salad.”

— Denis Leary

160. “It’s human nature for people to expect people to be what they see on the screen.”

— Denis Leary

161. “When you write about real life, there’s always a chance that somebody involved is going to see it and get upset.”

— Denis Leary

162. “In addition to my cousin, there were 30 or 40 guys I grew up with who became firefighters as well. So, I’ve been around firefighters all my life.”

— Denis Leary

163. “I wasn’t the best student. I wasn’t stupid, but I wasn’t paying a lot of attention.”

— Denis Leary

164. “On a movie, you have a great time, and you’re really enjoying the work, and then everybody is done and goes their separate ways, and you maybe never get to work with those people again.”

— Denis Leary

165. “I’ve been nominated for Emmys and Golden Globes, but I’ve never won one and I probably never will.”

— Denis Leary

166. “I don’t watch ‘American Idol.’ I don’t watch any of that stuff.”

— Denis Leary

167. “I did 12 years with nuns, you know. So I came out of it going, like, ‘I think Jesus is all right.’ The rest of it I think stinks to the high heavens.”

— Denis Leary

168. “The second season is genrtrally easier do because you know the actors better and they know the characters better and if everybody likes each other you can really go all types of places.”

— Denis Leary

169. “I went to see the ‘Spider-Man’ movies because my wife is a fan, and so are my kids.”

— Denis Leary

170. “Everything you look at now, the scripts that come in that you look at, the television scripts are way better than the movie script. The talent is going to television.”

— Denis Leary

171. “Every actor thinks he can do comedy, and it’s not true.”

— Denis Leary

172. “I needed someone really intense, but also somebody with a lot of theatrical credibility.”

— Denis Leary

173. “What’s politically correct a lot of times is not funny.”

— Denis Leary

174. “I fell asleep during ‘Year One’ twice. And my son, who never falls asleep during a Jack Black movie, also nodded off. That’s how bad it was. I was incredibly disappointed.”

— Denis Leary

175. “One thing that’s great about firefighters: If they don’t have the equipment they desperately need, they don’t have the help, they don’t care. They’ll do it on their own.”

— Denis Leary

176. “When I clicked into this idea of doing a band and examining a band as a dysfunctional family, I wanted to reverse that Rescue Me formula.”

— Denis Leary

177. “You just can’t win. Men have very recent land mines in their heads. Women have recorded conversations and photographs in their heads from 15 years ago.”

— Denis Leary

178. “Dustin Hoffman said this one time, that if he hadn’t made it as a film star, he would still be happy as a character actor because he was a character actor because of his face from day one, so he would always work in the theater.”

— Denis Leary

179. “I’m still pretty self-centered, greedy and angry.”

— Denis Leary

180. “When I was doing standup, I always wanted to get out of the standup world and take it back into the theatrical world, like with ‘No Cure For Cancer.’”

— Denis Leary

181. “I just think it’s difficult for them to see the forest for the trees right now, which I can’t blame them for, given the circumstances they found themselves in.”

— Denis Leary

182. “I don’t want to see a ‘Sopranos’ movie. This is just me. I like to think the end is where it was on TV as opposed to becoming a movie.”

— Denis Leary

183. “I think all priests should be married.”

— Denis Leary

184. “Doing the same character over and over, it gets boring.”

— Denis Leary

185. “When I was a teenager, you couldn’t get straight pants. Then in ’76, when punk started to hit, it was a revelation that you could find straight pants again.”

— Denis Leary

186. “Usually when you watch a film, you’re just sort of biting your nails about things you could have done differently.”

— Denis Leary

187. “If you see me doing a new stand-up special, it probably means I’ve been out of work for a while.”

— Denis Leary

188. “Good actors, especially when they know their character, will come in and either tell you in advance that they have an idea, or in the middle of the rehearsal or the scene they’ll let it loose and you go, ‘Ah that’s great.’”

— Denis Leary

189. “Having dealt with a lot of real firefighters, I know there are a lot of guys who, for lack of a better term, become addicted to the grief because it has kept them connected to these guys that they felt responsible for having lost.”

— Denis Leary

190. “I like to give the actors freedom to take what we have on the page and improve on it. And they do that quite a bit.”

— Denis Leary

191. “I’d love to do another television series. I really love the writing process, and as an actor I really like how much you get to examine in television.”

— Denis Leary

192. “I really like ‘Batman.’ Not the TV show, but the dark ‘Batman.’”

— Denis Leary

193. “Jon Stewart is exactly the same guy he’s always been, only with money. He knows that the moment he really believes he’s important, the funny goes away and he becomes Bill O’Reilly, except shorter and Jewish.”

— Denis Leary

194. “When I’m on stage, that’s me. It’s blown up, but that’s me.”

— Denis Leary

195. “There’s nothing wrong with an actor that can’t improvise, but if you’re going to improvise, you gotta make sure you got people that can play the game.”

— Denis Leary

196. “It would be great if firefighters across the country had the guarantee that they would be making enough money to support their family right from the get-go, but that’s not the case.”

— Denis Leary