Top 40 Rob Delaney Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “In real life, I am alarmingly boring.”

— Rob Delaney

2. “I love gay people. Or as I sometimes call them, ‘people.’”

— Rob Delaney

3. “I hate wearing suits and ties.”

— Rob Delaney

4. “Depression taught me the importance of compassion and hard work, and that you can overcome enormous obstacles.”

— Rob Delaney

5. “I can’t ‘make’ you love me. But I can fill my pantry with your favourite snacks and offer you a weekly stipend of $75.”

— Rob Delaney

6. “Comedians who are 22 years old can certainly be funny and clever, and be capable of telling jokes – but are they talking about their favorite TV shows, or a particular brand of shampoo?”

— Rob Delaney

7. “Running is special. We’ve all done it: well, poorly, focused, in fear, being pursued, toward a goal. It’s just elemental. Running is like fire.”

— Rob Delaney

8. “I’m endlessly fascinated by parenting, marriage, my wife and the ins and outs of marriage.”

— Rob Delaney

9. “Cats probably wouldn’t need 9 lives if they wore tiny little helmets and didn’t smoke cigarettes.”

— Rob Delaney

10. “It’s hard for me to get embarrassed, but the things that do embarrass me would be if anybody ever heard my wife and I talking in our robust, made-up language.”

— Rob Delaney

11. “In high school, I definitely fancied myself an intense guy, which is so lame.”

— Rob Delaney

12. “I’m crazy about Shakespeare, who was a notorious word inventor. And my wife is an English teacher, and she’s hilarious.”

— Rob Delaney

13. “In the ambiguity and shifting playing field of adult life, I often wish I could just fill in a dot and have someone say “Yes” and hand me a chicken leg, or “No” and slap me with an old fish.”

— Rob Delaney

14. “With Twitter, you just want to make people laugh in their meeting; on stage, people have paid for their tickets with their hard-earned money, so I owe them the truth as I experience it.”

— Rob Delaney

15. “Politicians, it’s in their job description to just lie, every day.”

— Rob Delaney

16. “It’s probably not love if you don’t press your face to the toilet seat after they’ve used it to feel their warmth.”

— Rob Delaney

17. “Well, Mitt Romney is a very attractive comedic target. He’s irresistible to me. I mean, seriously, I want to pay less attention to him.”

— Rob Delaney

18. “The best thing you can do when you’re not feeling funny is go out and get more stimuli from the world, get out and walk around, read a book, go talk to some birds or a dog and replenish the well, as it were.”

— Rob Delaney

19. “On stage, I’m me. I’m a husband, I’m a dad, I’m a guy, I’m a mess – but I am a cohesive thing that you recognize as one human entity saying these things that he generally believes.”

— Rob Delaney

20. “I had always loved comedy, and acted out Steve Martin and Bill Cosby albums with my sister for my parents on road trips and stuff, and I loved to laugh and make people laugh.”

— Rob Delaney

21. “But I also know in standup, there’s nowhere to hide. You get on stage and you deliver, or you are eviscerated and you are thrown into a pile of bodies at the bottom of a mountain.”

— Rob Delaney

22. “I think your ambition for something changes as you go.”

— Rob Delaney

23. “I was an extroverted kid and performed, like, acting and singing. Then, the older I got, I realized I enjoyed performing things that I came up with myself more and I enjoyed making people laugh more than making people cry or think.”

— Rob Delaney

24. “On Twitter, I just want to make you laugh at all costs.”

— Rob Delaney

25. “We can and should complain about certain horrors of the modern world, but when it comes to the treatment of mental illness, the advances made in the last hundred years have been far more significant than the space program, nuclear fission, or even The Wire, for so many fortunate people.”

— Rob Delaney

26. “People moved in across the street and are immediately cutting down a huge tree. Their toothbrushes will know my buttonhole.”

— Rob Delaney

27. “I use Twitter as a tool to get involved with people, to sell tickets to gigs where I can stand in a room and smell the audience – and I love that!”

— Rob Delaney

28. “I want people to feel good about themselves.”

— Rob Delaney

29. “I’m a comedian at the beginning and the end of the day. I’m not affiliated with any campaign, nor do I generally find politics interesting enough to plan to be involved.”

— Rob Delaney

30. “The danger for a comedian on Twitter is the same danger that any civilian faces: sometimes you gotta put that phone down and go live your life. When you’re on Twitter, you’re not living, and if you’re not living, you’re not taking in stimuli with which you can create new material.”

— Rob Delaney

31. “My stand-up is far more rooted in reality than my Twitter.”

— Rob Delaney

32. “There is no physical paradise where he’s waiting for me, and for that I’m glad. I have to imagine that would get boring after a couple of centuries, for him, for me. For you. Rather, I suspect I am a glass of water, and when I die, the contents of my glass will be poured into the same vast ocean that Henry’s glass was poured into, and we will mingle together forever. We won’t know who’s who. And you’ll get poured in there one day, too.”

— Rob Delaney

33. “I no longer believe in freedom of speech.”

— Rob Delaney

34. “If you have an opinion on what other adults do consensually with other adults when they take their pants off, you’re a weirdo.”

— Rob Delaney

35. “In between Henry’s birth and his death was, of course, his life. That was my favorite part.”

— Rob Delaney

36. “Reflecting on his physical therapy reminds me that I’m not a fan of the “fighting” metaphor for cancer. I don’t think you fight it, or beat it. The effort I saw Henry expend, again and again, at the age of one, under such duress, suggests someone who could beat anything that can be beaten. Cancer’s pretty much going to do what it wants. Should it come for me, I hope I’ll just ride the wave.”

— Rob Delaney

37. “I like to imagine that those dead, unloved nut jobs became friends under the earth and have their little crazy community where they show one another the kindness they were denied while living.”

— Rob Delaney

38. “Willful ignorance or resistance to alleged facts has been a big ingredient in any success I’ve had.”

— Rob Delaney

39. “IT IS SO CURIOUS how hearing something once in your youth can dictate a thought pattern all the way through your life. I was nine, a man said something nonchalantly, and now when I see a slate at age thirty-six, as far as I’m concerned, its primary use is for beheading boys. Once that’s done it can be used for roofing.”

— Rob Delaney

40. “Why don’t you just leave open the possibility that others love you, whether you like it or not, and that the people who’d like you to stick around aren’t, to a man, wrong.”

— Rob Delaney

41. “I was basically trucking along as a functional drunk who knew he had a problem but hoped nothing truly terrible would happen.”

— Rob Delaney

42. “To help safeguard her, I remained a vigilant bather and hand-washer. I also made sure we didn’t share cups or utensils and I took strict care not to poo in her mouth, even at night.”

— Rob Delaney

43. “I felt like I was being asked to find an individual lentil in a warehouse that a tornado had just torn through.”

— Rob Delaney

44. “Make it easier for your citizens to be healthy and smart and they will save you in ways you have yet to imagine. Make it difficult and your nation will swirl history’s toilet on its way to hell.”

— Rob Delaney