Top 40 Richard Ayoade Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I’m just terrible. At talking. With words.”

— Richard Ayoade

2. “I’m not a terribly social person, and so I have to really like people to work with them.”

— Richard Ayoade

3. “I think people have the capacity to be many different things and many seemingly contradictory behaviors.”

— Richard Ayoade

4. “Why have a pet hate? Why should it be confined? My hate is both wide ranging and total.”

— Richard Ayoade

5. “Has any film ever been made that’s better than the worst episode of Columbo?”

— Richard Ayoade

6. “One man’s Michelangelo is another man’s Milli Vanilli.”

— Richard Ayoade

7. “Somewhere in the distance a wolf could be howling, but he decides not to. This particular wolf is by nature quiet and doesn’t wish to blindly conform to stereotype.”

— Richard Ayoade

8. “No. I really don’t think I’m cool. I’m not.”

— Richard Ayoade

9. “I’m pretty bad at seeing new films.”

— Richard Ayoade

10. “You know, it’s funny: there are never any middle-aged souls. You hear about people being young souls, you really hear about old souls, but what about middle-aged souls?”

— Richard Ayoade

11. “Shyness can be interpreted as a kind of aggression.”

— Richard Ayoade

12. “Because to be moved by something made by someone who has done something bad would mean that a bad person possesses the capacity to connect to us; that they haven’t, somehow, forfeited their humanity.”

— Richard Ayoade

13. “When my parents weren’t watching the news, they were either waiting to watch the news or recovering from watching the news. The news confirmed their feeling that things were terrible everywhere, and there was nothing anyone could do about it apart from keep abreast of developments. I’ve avoided the news ever since.”

— Richard Ayoade

14. “The most interesting part of filming is what the actors do. That’s the primary link between the story and the audience.”

— Richard Ayoade

15. “I have all these things that I want to say to her, like... Like how I can tell she’s a lonely person, even if other people can’t. Cause I know what it feels like to be lost and lonely and invisible.”

— Richard Ayoade

16. “I don’t know how to be myself. It’s like I’m permanently outside myself. Like, like you could push your hands straight through me if you wanted to. And I can see the type of man I want to be versus the type of man I actually am and I know that I’m doing it but I’m incapable of what needs to be done. I’m like Pinocchio, a wooden boy. Not a real boy. And it kills me.”

— Richard Ayoade

17. “I try to write every day. Sometimes the things come out well, and sometimes they don’t. When they come out well you think, Wow, I must be really great; and when they come out poorly, you think you must be terrible, but the truth is that’s how any process works.”

— Richard Ayoade

18. “As in, I think Badlands is one of the funniest films of all time: Every day I wish I was carried off to a magical land, but that never happened is one of the funniest lines in any film.”

— Richard Ayoade

19. “The act of seeing any film generally is you knowing more than the characters, even if its the classic Hitchcock shot of two people talking and a bomb being under the table. Part of the pleasure of it is seeing where people go wrong, and the irony of situations.”

— Richard Ayoade

20. “Fury is something you need, and if someone tells you otherwise, try screaming at them. They’ll often go quiet and start to cry. That’s when you know you’ve won.”

— Richard Ayoade

21. “This is why Willis is one of the most powerful actors of this or any other era. He delivers dialogue like he’s calming a jittery leopard.”

— Richard Ayoade

22. “I’ve always felt that actors in my experience have a very good and accurate instinct about whether something feels right or not. They just have a sense because they have to literally do it.”

— Richard Ayoade

23. “A lot of comedies are based on the reaction shot. You have one person doing something stupid and one person is generally the straight man, and the laughs generally come on the reaction of the straight man to the funny thing the other person has done.”

— Richard Ayoade

24. “Even so-called ‘short novels’ are pretty long and can take several hours to read, so make sure you stay hydrated. I like to keep an isotonic sports drink handy if I’m going to be reading for any longer than forty minutes. I’ll also take regular breaks and make sure I’m wearing loose-fitting clothing.”

— Richard Ayoade

25. “I only ever privately tell people stuff for the scene. And I often ask what they feel is right. Normally, by the time that we’re filming, if it doesn’t work, it always the script.”

— Richard Ayoade

26. “To be in a video is a ridiculous thing. It’s almost impossible to do it without any humour.”

— Richard Ayoade

27. “I don’t know that I brood. I just occasionally take time out to silently consider the specific ways in which others have wronged me.”

— Richard Ayoade

28. “I’ve found out that I may be more awkward than I thought I was, but then I never saw anyone because I was in my room a lot. It’s fine not to speak when you’re on your own and to stammer and to not have eye contact but, outside, it’s frowned upon.”

— Richard Ayoade

29. “So I’ve tried to make this book as dense as possible, like a neutron star. And if you think I came up with that simile by googling ‘What stuff is most dense?’, you’d be wrong. I already knew neutron stars were maybe dense before I googled it to make sure.”

— Richard Ayoade

30. “Cinema helps us to remember that although we all have the right to shine, some of us must shine in the background, out of focus, and not too brightly.”

— Richard Ayoade

31. “Writing’s an opportunity for me to get away from all that and create a world in which women view me positively: the ones who support me are rewarded, and the ones who don’t are definitively and objectively proved to be wrong.”

— Richard Ayoade

32. “Dispensing with the rug is a kenotic act of distillation. Such men eschew ornament and ostentation. Their very being seems to say, ‘Have you any idea how quickly I can shower?”

— Richard Ayoade

33. “Heroes hate wasting time. ‘You’re wasting my time,’ they’ll say. Yet they devote very little time to time management, and rarely consult a diary.”

— Richard Ayoade

34. “American television is very much created by the writers, just the volume of it. The writers are so key. You’re just trying to do something that serves that script. And in general, film isn’t all about the script, really.”

— Richard Ayoade

35. “The height of your hair illustrates the emotional bandwidth in which you may operate, which is why Chris Walken can emphasise the syllable which he deems appropriate rather than the one that might convey meaning.”

— Richard Ayoade

36. “For a tree without a past is like a man without roots; and unless we stand in rich soil, our leaves will blow like blossom into the night.”

— Richard Ayoade

37. “No one who achieved anything was ‘there’ for someone else. They were elsewhere. Achieving.”

— Richard Ayoade

38. “When I buy Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, the acquisitive part of me is buying it for the deluded part of me that thinks I’ll read it one day, while the archivist part of me keeps it on a shelf with all the other books I haven’t read, so that one day it can present a logistical problem to those who survive me.”

— Richard Ayoade

39. “This is God asking you to leave His kingdom, and by all accounts He’s not a Huge One for self-doubt. There is no verse saying, ‘And lo, God felt that, on second thoughts, He’d been a bit hasty, so He said, “Adam, mate, at the end of the day it’s just a bit of fruit. It’s no biggie. I felt a bit mugged off by your missus, I’d been working a six-day week, I’m a little bit tired and emotional, we’re all new to this game, come back to the garden and we can thrash it out over a couple of tins.”

— Richard Ayoade

40. “Donna can’t believe that one person could own all of these clothes. My thoughts turn, as I’m sure do yours, to moth management. Sometimes people ask me what I do, and the correct answer is ‘almost nothing’, but if pressed, I might say that I’m a writer.”

— Richard Ayoade

41. “We applaud both her dogged grit and the film’s message: that there are some people who, despite shutting everyone out of their lives in order to achieve their goals, can repair the untold damage they’ve wreaked by making a small admission of culpability late in Act III, followed by a declaration of love.”

— Richard Ayoade

42. “We can’t live in dreams any more that we can live in the clouds or under socialism.”

— Richard Ayoade

43. “Fact is, a commercial aeroplane is one of the most restrictive enviornments in the world. Want to know the difference between a commercial aeroplane and communist China? You can smoke, guff and make consensual love in communist China without fear of reproach!”

— Richard Ayoade