Top 120 Dylan Moran Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “There’s always a host of voices you’re inspired by. I love Don DeLillo, and I love Isaac Bashevis Singer, and I love Beckett, and I love Pinter. He’s one of the funniest voices in English literature since Dickens.”

— Dylan Moran

52. “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

53. “Organic? I grew up on Angel Delight. We didn’t have anything in the house if it wasn’t neon!”

— Dylan Moran

54. “As an Irish person, there’s a historical fascination with America: America is the default green and promised land for Irish people and Italians; that’s what we grow up with.”

— Dylan Moran

55. “I never thought I want to do anything, really, except not go to work properly and turn up at the same place every day and eat sandwiches in the same canteen, if I can possibly help it, as I don’t think I’d be very good at it.”

— Dylan Moran

56. “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!”

— Dylan Moran

57. “You’re never going to go. Why would you go? It’s a disgusting place. It’s always wet even when it’s dry. There’s nothing there. Farmers aren’t really people, you know this. They’re just necessary, we need somebody to kill cows.”

— Dylan Moran

58. “I wanted to show off – a simple impulse or drive; in much the same way as some kids wanted to play football, I wanted to show off. Not complicated in that sense, very natural; it just depends on how you want to show off.”

— Dylan Moran

59. “Don’t clap I’m not a jazz band for Christ’s sake.”

— Dylan Moran

60. “I’m organised in some ways, but not in others.”

— Dylan Moran

61. “What I prefer is an audience who listen. And are intelligent. Which I try and assume every audience is. And that if something goes wrong, it’s generally my fault and not theirs.”

— Dylan Moran

62. “I think that women just have a primeval instinct to make soup, which they will try to foist on anybody who looks like a likely candidate.”

— Dylan Moran

63. “Because their bones are growing, they can only sleep in certain positions, obviously. The crucifix and the swastika tend to be the most popular. Sometimes a combination of the two.”

— Dylan Moran

64. “Showing off seemed to me to be a highly valuable and necessary activity when I was 20.”

— Dylan Moran

65. “We are both drawn to surreal situations so the writing was a joy.”

— Dylan Moran

66. “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

67. “The truth is that I’m constitutionally incapable of doing an ordinary job.”

— Dylan Moran

68. “Have I had therapy? I went to a yoga class once.”

— Dylan Moran

69. “Irish people give big hellos and very little goodbyes. Unless they’re female, and then they spend five hours talking in the doorway to the person that’s leaving their house.”

— Dylan Moran

70. “When did you ever hear of a child not in need? ‘Oh that’s enough jam tart for me, I’ll just go now and clean the toilets.’”

— Dylan Moran

71. “When things are going well, I can’t write fast enough to keep up with my mind. Writing walks, speech runs and talk flies. Other times, though, it’s like fishing.”

— Dylan Moran

72. “You look like a horse in a man costume.”

— Dylan Moran

73. “America is this incredible mosaic of immigrants, so people really want to be anchored in some kind of culture as well as the one they are living in.”

— Dylan Moran

74. “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

75. “Cooking? Oh we were great, you’d take anything and melt cheese on it, and the one who could guess what it was didn’t have to wash up!”

— Dylan Moran

76. “Now, I meant to talk about something else earlier on, and I’ve forgotten what it was. I’ve remembered what it is again, but I’ve also forgotten. And that’s really what adult life is like most of the time.”

— Dylan Moran

77. “Kids, they are always hurting themselves. It’s like, “Quick, get me to casualty quick!” while your doing something important like sitting down picking your ear.”

— Dylan Moran

78. “Your mind is a hive of worms. And worms don’t live in a hive, so it already feels unnatural.”

— Dylan Moran

79. “In the same way, there is some creature gnawing away inside of me, urging me to do things in different ways.”

— Dylan Moran

80. “The measure of a conversation is how much mutual recognition there is in it; how much shared there is in it. If you’re talking about what’s in your own head, or without thought to what people looking and listening will feel, you might as well be in a room talking to yourself.”

— Dylan Moran

81. “He could dismiss several schools of philosophy by shifting slightly in his chair or toting his whisky glass.”

— Dylan Moran

82. “I have a very low level of recognition, which is fine by me.”

— Dylan Moran

83. “I write all the time, but you just want to be careful what you put out. That’s all. You want to have the confidence that you’ve done what you need to do to it, because otherwise it’s an exercise in vanity.”

— Dylan Moran

84. “Idioms are a big thing in Ireland. They want to fill the time, to show how good they are at talk – it’s a talk-off.”

— Dylan Moran

85. “I thought The Office was good, though I didn’t think of it as a sitcom, just as a very good programme.”

— Dylan Moran

86. “I do think it’s perfectly natural and human to want to invest belief in something. It’s just a facet of who we are. What do I believe in? I believe in the obvious things. The people I’m close to and my work – it’s not complicated.”

— Dylan Moran

87. “Do your own thing. Speak in your voice.”

— Dylan Moran

88. “One thing that’s coming up a lot is: are you as grumpy as you appear from this Black Books thing.”

— Dylan Moran

89. “I’d be hard-pressed to think of anybody who’s made me laugh, who’s funny, but who’s also relentlessly positive.”

— Dylan Moran

90. “You learn very very quickly that it is mostly about swearing, actually. That’s all you’re doing, swearing, in a box with wheels.”

— Dylan Moran

91. “The characters can’t be wittier than people are in real life. They have to be character witty.”

— Dylan Moran

92. “Paper acts as an eraser on the mind, as soon as you look at what you’ve written.”

— Dylan Moran

93. “I would never really analyse what I do. I leave that to other people – I’m not a critic. I just want to get on with whatever I have in hand, you know? Just try to make the best job of the available material.”

— Dylan Moran

94. “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

95. “The East is very mysterious to Westerners. Even post-Cold War, it’s still an unknown entity.”

— Dylan Moran

96. “I don’t want to do the same thing over and over again.”

— Dylan Moran

97. “A man does not know how he came by the half a pie he is holding in his hand!”

— Dylan Moran

98. “It’s true that I have spoken about doing a book before, but then everyone you speak to is planning to write a book.”

— Dylan Moran

99. “Home gigs can be hard because it’s an odd collision. More than anything, I feel self-conscious when my family are in the audience. I’m doing this job which is not quite acting – part of it is me, part performance. You’re presenting a cartoon of yourself to people who know you as a line-drawing.”

— Dylan Moran

100. “I was lucky in the sense that I was never blessed with an overly reflective nature.”

— Dylan Moran