Top 70 Tim Dorsey Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Hang on to your dreams with everything you got. Because the best life is when your dreams come true. The second-best is when they don’t but you never stop chasing them.”

— Tim Dorsey

2. “Relieve stress through hysterical screaming.”

— Tim Dorsey

3. “Always walk away from a fight. Then ambush.”

— Tim Dorsey

4. “Coleman, there are three – and only three – kinds of people in this world: Those who don’t know they’re damaged and blame others; those who realize they’re damaged and blame others; and then people like you and me, who wear damage like comfortable pajamas.”

— Tim Dorsey

5. “Speaking of names, a word to parents: Stop using alternate spellings for your kids. Aimee, Eryn, Bil, Derik. You’re only costing jobs. The whole customized-coffee-mug and key-chain industry. An entire generation is being robbed of their roadside-Florida-souvenir heritage. “Daddy, why don’t they ever have my name? I see something close, but it’s spelled different.” “Sorry, honey, we decided to be pricks.”

— Tim Dorsey

6. “My problem is with the warped value system our culture has. Why is it that if you knife a woman in a movie it’s PG, but if you swear at her it’s rated R and if you make love to her it’s rated X?”

— Tim Dorsey

7. “I don’t suffer from insanity. I can actually say that I enjoy it.”

— Tim Dorsey

8. “A prosthetic leg with a Willie Nelson bumper sticker washed ashore on the beach, which meant it was Florida. Then it got weird.”

— Tim Dorsey

9. “Don’t make fun of people who are different. Unless they have more money and influence. Then you must.”

— Tim Dorsey

10. “Nothing builds confidence like live ammo.”

— Tim Dorsey

11. “Remember the key to life,” Serge shouted over the engine. “Always act like you deserve to be here.”

— Tim Dorsey

12. “Look forward to the wonderment of growing up, raising a family and driving by the gas station where the popular kids now work.”

— Tim Dorsey

13. “Murder is such a charged word. You know how some people fixate and won’t let things go? They’re called cops.”

— Tim Dorsey

14. “Make no mistake: I’m all about guns! I just love the legal incongruities our national discourse has spawned, like I can buy a shotgun any time of day without a serious background check, but if I need something for my sniffles, it’s six forms of ID and complete school transcripts. The government has essentially created a system where if I want to clear a head cold, the easiest cure is to blow my brains out.”

— Tim Dorsey

15. “It’s only socialism if the money goes down, not up.”

— Tim Dorsey

16. “Far too quickly we grow into jaded adults and lose our appreciation for silliness.”

— Tim Dorsey

17. “Orlando. Tourism on steroids. Florida’s mutant chromosome with mouse ears. One of the newer attractions is an air-conditioned dome over a sprawling, man-made replica of the state’s natural landscape. They bulldozed nature to build it.”

— Tim Dorsey

18. “He’s the south end of a northbound horse.”

— Tim Dorsey

19. “Our political process appears to be a toxic dance of mutually assured destruction that takes all the citizens down with you, and that can’t be right. So I’ve prepared a little experiment.”

— Tim Dorsey

20. “All politics is marketing. And in marketing, there are but two variables: product and salesmanship.”

— Tim Dorsey

21. “Nature’s what it’s all about, but our people have been brainwashed into thinking that life is a cell phone against your head and the TV on a beer commercial with hot chicks.”

— Tim Dorsey

22. “Be careful,” Serge admonished. “It’s dumb out there.”

— Tim Dorsey

23. “Like no other place on earth. Raw natural beauty, relentless freedom, unorthodox natives. A friend told me something else about the Keys I never forgot: Down here, nobody is who they seem to be. When people in other parts of the country want to reinvent themselves, they come to Florida. But when people in Florida want to reinvent themselves, they come to the Keys.”

— Tim Dorsey

24. “Anyplace you walked, massive lengths of Spanish moss draped from overhead branches like an endless cavern of ZZ Top beards.”

— Tim Dorsey

25. “Serge bowed his own head and closed his eyes “God, please protect us from your followers. Amen.”

— Tim Dorsey

26. “Florida is a theme park,” said Serge. “And the theme is weirdness.”

— Tim Dorsey

27. “The whole key to social climbing is not having spinach in your teeth.”

— Tim Dorsey

28. “Gasparilla is Tampa’s annual heritage festival, and Tampa’s heritage appears to be about alcohol.”

— Tim Dorsey

29. “The brain wasn’t engineered to deal with that rarefied level of dumbness.”

— Tim Dorsey

30. “You open a door and find a midget, and there’s no way you can be in a bad mood. It’s just not possible.”

— Tim Dorsey

31. “What’s this whole Parrot Head phenomenon about, anyway?” asked Crease. “It’s kind of like AA in reverse.”

— Tim Dorsey

32. “You see, life’s all about possibilities. Opportunities are everywhere, except most people are locked into rigid routines and mortgages and clipping coupons and aren’t even looking. But I see possibilities in everything: tangible objects, memories, thin air. It’s at once a blessing and a curse.”

— Tim Dorsey

33. “He loved his family and fellow man, never raised his voice or fists, and was rewarded with a lifelong, routine digestion of small doses of humiliation.”

— Tim Dorsey

34. “Do not disturb!’ ‘No molestar!’ – ever get the idea some things aren’t translating right?”

— Tim Dorsey

35. “These are different animals now. They’re starting to winnow out the weak at the fringe of the herd. We need to hurry or this could affect our snack situation.”

— Tim Dorsey

36. “Ethnic jokes are the last refuge of a bankrupt intellect.”

— Tim Dorsey

37. “What kind of lists?” “You know: best of, worst of, one hundred reasons why making lists prevents you from doing something meaningful. Let’s start.”

— Tim Dorsey

38. “Life’s too important to learn new clocks, so I unplug them all and get on with the plot.”

— Tim Dorsey

39. “A strip club is one of the few places where two groups voluntarily come together who have such precipitous contrasts in net worth and familiarity with violence, each group with a head-and-shoulders edge in one category. The basic math of a tropical storm.”

— Tim Dorsey

40. “She knew my buttons and kept pressing them like an epileptic in an arcade. If it’s any consolation, I gave her fair warning.” “Oh, my God!”

— Tim Dorsey

41. “Yes Serge has killed a lot of people, but let’s not overlook all of his other accomplishments.”

— Tim Dorsey

42. “I go over my own escape routes all the time. To survive in this state, you have to think like the French Resistance.”

— Tim Dorsey

43. “The way I figured, I was just a kid, and if I could take it apart, they surely could put it back together. Then my mom would walk in the kitchen and see me standing on a chair at the counter, holding a screwdriver with disassembled components all over the place. ‘What the heck’s going on?’ ‘I’m intrigued how the blender works.”

— Tim Dorsey

44. “We’re all damaged. It’s a universal component of the human condition, like the stages of grief, deja vu, and expired coupons.”

— Tim Dorsey

45. “With women, you don’t get to pick the meaning of what you mean. They do. All men understand this.”

— Tim Dorsey

46. “Your mom’s not that bad,” said Jim. “Are you trying to make me mad?” “Okay she is.” “I knew it. You’ve never liked her.” “What’s the right answer?” “So you’re just telling me what I want to hear?” Jim reached over and put a hand on his wifes. “I love you.”

— Tim Dorsey

47. “Something else that separates me from society: Super-Positive Perspective! Where normal people would whine about subpar accommodations, I choose to view it as upscale camping.”

— Tim Dorsey

48. “I also sort of broke his neck, just to be careful,” said Serge.”

— Tim Dorsey

49. “That’s life in general: Can’t let jerks dictate your emotions.”

— Tim Dorsey

50. “But instead they tell you they’ll come to fix your cable between noon and five, and I say, okay, I’ll pay my next bill between July and November, but they don’t laugh.”

— Tim Dorsey