Billy Connolly Quotes

When people say "it's always the last place you look". Of course it is. Why would you keep looking after you've found it?

Life is a waste of time, and time is a waste of life. Get wasted all the time, and you'll have the time of your life!

Never trust a man who, when left alone in a room with a tea cozy, doesn't try it on.

Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes. After that who cares? He's a mile away and you've got his shoes!

A fart is just your arse applauding.

Life is supposed to be fun. It's not a job or occupation. We're here only once and we should have a bit of a laugh.

The desire to be a politician should bar you for life from ever becoming one.” "Don't vote. It just encourages them....

I don't believe in angels and I have trouble with the whole God thing. I don't want to say I don't believe in God but I don't think I do. But I believe in people who do.

My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger" - Billy Connolly

I think my securities far outweigh my insecurities. I am not nearly as afraid of myself and my imagination as I used to be.

If you give people a chance, they shine.

Fuck the begrudgers

Never trust people who've only got one fucking book.

My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger.

I think of my life as a series of moments and I've found that the great moments often don't have too much to them. They're not huge, complicated events; they're just magical wee moments when somebody says 'I love you' or 'You're a really good at what you do' or simply 'You're a good person'.

There are two seasons in Scotland: June and Winter

Marriage is a wonderful invention; but then again so is a bicycle repair kit.

People often say that football and boxing are the ways out of the working class and they are your ticket out of that kind of life, if you happen to want to leave it. But, for me, the library is the key. That is where the escape tunnel is. All of the knowledge in the world is there. The great brains of the world are at your fingertips.

There is this viewpoint that if you have come from the working class you have come from nothing, whereas the middle and upper classes are something, and I don’t hold with that opinion. I think the working class is something. It is everything. They are the builders of society, and without them the whole house falls down.

All anyone really needs to know about barbed wire is that it can tear the arse out of your trousers, give a cow a good fright, entangle a Yorkshire terrier for life, and is nasty stuff made by greedy men.

I hope I’ve shown a few disbelievers that they should never discount those they think are different, disorganised or distractible.

Never trust a man who when left alone with a tea cosey... doesn't try it on.

Blessed are those who yodel - for they shall never be troubled by offers of work.

What horrifies me most about war memorials is that no anti-war sentiments are ever displayed. It's as if war is fun or noble, when actually it's all about shit and snot and blood and guts and soldiers stomachs hanging out and people with their faces blown off. But they never showed that side of it. Perhaps, if they did, there'd be less of it.

Oh, I can picture myself rattling along Route 66 on that thing, headphones on, singing along to ZZ Top's 'Sharp Dressed Man' or the opening line from 'Born to be Wild' by Steppenwolf - 'Get your motor running...' The trike brings out that in all of us, which is no bad thing. Forget Viagra, get yourself a trike!

Everybody's born to do a certain thing and if you're dead jimmy you've found it. And if you're good at something, just keep doing it until you're fed up...then do something else. look.. You're here to make babies and look after the place. You know ?" (Billy Connolly) Spoken Word on Spiritual city: -Off of Glastonbury Song

That evening, as he got ready for bed, he heard his mother and father talking in their bedroom, and that was how he learned that Billy had been naked when he was discovered and that the police had arrested a man who lived with his mother in a clean little house not far from where the body was found. David knew from the way they were talking that something very bad had happened to Billy before he died, something to do with the man from the clean little house. ... Now, in another bedroom, he thought of Jonathan Tulvey and Anna, and wondered if a man from a clean little house, a man who lived with his mother and kept sweets in his pockets, had made them go down with him to the railroad tracks. And there, in the darkness, he had played with them, in his way.

So you’re British?’ said Billy. ‘I think of myself as English first, British second. It’s a way of keeping the Scots and Welsh at a distance, never mind the Irish.

remember what Billy Connolly said, that there isn’t bad weather, only wrong clothes.

So I'm on a little one-man crusade to bring the obituary closer to the front of the paper. Let's sing a bit louder about the unsung. Rather than spending all our time watching stupid people doing stupid things and being filmed by other stupid people on reality TV shows, why don't we spend a few minutes each day reading about good people doing good things? I'm not being a hippy. It's just that we've got to improve ourselves as a species or we are absolutely doomed.

What horrifies me most about war memorials is that no anti-war sentiments are ever displayed. It's as if war is fun or noble, when actually it's all about shit and snot and blood and guts and soldiers stomachs hanging out and people with their faces blown off. But they never showed that side of it. Perhaps, if they did, there'd be less of it. I remember seeing a picture of a soldier in Vietnam who was sitting, waiting to die, with his jaw missing. His head now started at the top row of teeth; everything beneath that was gone. They didn't put that on the recruitment posters, did they? But that's what war is to me. And I don't care who we're fighting, I don't hate them enough to do something like that to them.

life can be tough, and you either give up and moan about it, or you have a go at it.

Sometimes there's a tackiness about Route 66 that out-tacks any tackiness I've ever seen anywhere else. And the Meramec Caverns are the pinnacle of that tack.

Even though everybody knows that when you light up a cigarette God takes an hour off your life and gives it to Keith Richards.

Chic Murray once told me, he fell in the street, and a woman said to him, ‘Did you fall?’ He said, ‘No, I’m trying to break a bar of chocolate in my back pocket.

But I think I want to become part of Scotland when I die. In a coffin, you just turn to dust, so I would prefer to be buried in a wicker casket, or in a sheet like the Africans do, so that I actually become part of the earth. I would like a tree to be planted on top of me. And I told my wife Pamela a long time ago the epitaph that I want on my gravestone: Jesus Christ, is that the time already? Failing that, I would like an epitaph in writing so tiny that visitors would have to inch right next to my gravestone to read it. It would say: You're standing on my balls.

Film and TV V.I.P, seeker of the peace, part time chandelier cleaner, a legend in his own time, oppressor of champions, soldier of fortune, world traveller, bonvivant, all round good guy, international lover, casual hero, philosopher, wars fought, bears wrestled, equations solved, virgins enlightened, revolutions quelled, tigers castrated, orgies organised, bars quaffed dry, governments run, test rockets flown, life president of the Liquidarian Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

And we took off-whoosh-into the night. Through the clouds, we hurtled up into the sky. And this man farted. I will never forget it as long as I live. Not only was it the worst fart, it was the longest. Maybe, it was the position he was in, he had squeezed his ass all up. But he was kinda leanin over and pointing his ass up toward me. And it made the strangest noise. It was like cloth tearing.

We were watching this procession. It was fucking terrible and the crucifix was about 20 feet high coming around the corner. And my wee grandson says, 'who's that?' I say, 'that's Jesus'. He says, 'BABY JESUS?!' I say, 'yeah, that's him'. He says, 'SOMEBODY KILLED BABY JESUS!' It was the most sincere religious cry. If Christians did that, I would believe them. 'WHAT? THE BASTARDS KILLED JESUS!

Brave (2012) C-94m. 1⁄2 D: Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman. Voices of Kelly Macdonald, Emma Thompson, Billy Connolly, Robbie Coltrane, Kevin McKidd, Julie Walters, Craig Ferguson, John Ratzenberger. In ancient times, a Scottish princess named Merida resists her mother’s constant training to become a future queen, preferring a boisterous existence roaming the forest with her trusty bow and arrow. When it comes time for her to choose a suitor, she runs away and stumbles onto a witch who agrees to change her fate through a magical dark spell. Typically handsome Pixar animated feature has robust characters but a formulaic feel—until the story takes a very strange turn. A final burst of emotion almost redeems it. Oscar winner for Best Animated Feature. 3-D Digital Widescreen. [PG] Braveheart (1995) C-177m. 1⁄2 D: Mel Gibson. Mel

After my knighthood was announced, a woman from the BBC came to Glasgow to interview me. We sat down in a lovely hotel in a nice part of town, and she hit me with her first question: ‘This must mean a lot to you, with you coming from nothing?’ I looked at her, and I laughed. ‘I didnae come from nothing,’ I told her. ‘I come from something.’ I mean, I have never hidden that I come from humble stock. I grew up in the tenements of post-war Glasgow. In fact, I used to specify exactly where, onstage: it was on a kitchen floor, ‘on the linoleum, three floors up’. The early years of my life were spent in grinding poverty … but it wasn’t nothing. It was something – something very important. There is this viewpoint that if you have come from the working class you have come from nothing, whereas the middle and upper classes are something,

You’ll also notice that there’s an awful lot of swearing in the pages that follow. I don’t apologise for that. It’s not ‘bad language’, it’s ordinary language. I don’t understand the snobbishness about swearing. I grew up swearing. Everybody around me swore. It’s part of our culture. It can be poetic, it can be violent, and it can be very funny. It’s the rhythm of how we speak, and the colour of how we communicate – at least when we’re being honest and open and raw. So, if you’re likely to be offended by the swearing, you may as well fuck off now.

Some people seem to be so afraid of being alone with themselves and their thoughts that they have to be talking to someone on the phone constantly. And talking really, really loudly. It’s as though they’re trying to shout the quiet out of their lives. ‘HELLO? YEAH! I’M ALL RIGHT, HOW ARE YOU?’ And as soon as one call ends, they’re desperately trying to call someone else before the silence settles back. ‘HELLO?’ It’s madness.

I hate sand. It just fucking sticks to me and makes me uncomfortable.

Books have always meant a great deal to me. When I was young, people used to have all kinds of advice as to how the working class could free themselves from factory life and all of that frustration, but for me the true secret tunnel, the hidden escape route, was in the library, reading books.

and everyone would stare at me because they were starving.

A couple of weeks before, while going over a Variety list of the most popular songs of 1935 and earlier, to use for the picture’s sound track – which was going to consist only of vintage recording played not as score but as source music – my eye stopped on a .933 standard, words by E.Y. (“Yip”) Harburg (with producer Billy Rose), music by Harold Arlen, the team responsible for “Over the Rainbow”, among many notable others, together and separately. Legend had it that the fabulous Ms. Dorothy Parker contributed a couple of lines. There were just two words that popped out at me from the title of the Arlen-Harburg song, “It’s Only a Paper Moon”. Not only did the sentiment of the song encapsulate metaphorically the main relationship in our story – Say, it’s only a paper moon Sailing over a cardboard sea But it wouldn’t be make-believe If you believed in me – the last two words of the title also seemed to me a damn good movie title. Alvin and Polly agreed, but when I tried to take it to Frank Yablans, he wasn’t at all impressed and asked me what it meant. I tried to explain. He said that he didn’t “want us to have our first argument,” so why didn’t we table this conversation until the movie was finished? Peter Bart called after a while to remind me that, after all, the title Addie Pray was associated with a bestselling novel. I asked how many copies it had sold in hardcover. Peter said over a hundred thousand. That was a lot of books but not a lot of moviegoers. I made that point a bit sarcastically and Peter laughed dryly. The next day I called Orson Welles in Rome, where he was editing a film. It was a bad connection so we had to speak slowly and yell: “Orson! What do you think of this title?!” I paused a beat or two, then said very clearly, slowly and with no particular emphasis or inflection: “Paper …Moon!” There was a silence for several moments, and then Orson said, loudly, “That title is so good, you don’t even need to make the picture! Just release the title! Armed with that reaction, I called Alvin and said, “You remember those cardboard crescent moons they have at amusement parks – you sit in the moon and have a picture taken?” (Polly had an antique photo of her parents in one of them.) We already had an amusement park sequence in the script so, I continued to Alvin, “Let’s add a scene with one of those moons, then we can call the damn picture Paper Moon!” And this led eventually to a part of the ending, in which we used the photo Addie had taken of herself as a parting gift to Moze – alone in the moon because he was too busy with Trixie to sit with his daughter – that she leaves on the truck seat when he drops her off at her aunt’s house. … After the huge popular success of the picture – four Oscar nominations (for Tatum, Madeline Kahn, the script, the sound) and Tatum won Best Supporting Actress (though she was the lead) – the studio proposed that we do a sequel, using the second half of the novel, keeping Tatum and casting Mae West as the old lady; they suggested we call the new film Harvest Moon. I declined. Later, a television series was proposed, and although I didn’t want to be involved (Alvin Sargent became story editor), I agreed to approve the final casting, which ended up being Jodie Foster and Chris Connolly, both also blondes. When Frank Yablans double-checked about my involvement, I passed again, saying I didn’t think the show would work in color – too cute – and suggested they title the series The Adventures of Addie Pray. But Frank said, “Are you kidding!? We’re calling it Paper Moon - that’s a million-dollar title!” The series ran thirteen episodes.

My father once dropped fifty pence, bent down to pick it up and it hit him on the back of the neck. He used to wake up at night to see if he’d lost any sleep.

When I was an unhappy little boy, going to the library changed my life. It may even have saved it. Amazing as it sounds, literature can do that for you. Books are your ticket to the whole world. They're a free ticket to the entire earth

When I was an unhappy little boy, going to the library changed my life. It may even have saved it. Amazing as it sounds, literature can do that for you. Books are your ticket to the whole world. They're a free ticket to the entire earth.

Billy grinned. ‘Seems to me that you might be up to no good here. Are you a bad man?’ Quayle smiled back, and the lights of the bar gleamed like dying stars in the void of his eyes. ‘Trust me when I say that you have no conception.’ Billy’s smile faded.

Never trust a man who, when left alone in a room with a tea cosy, doesn’t try it on.

Have you ever drunk Zombies? It’s kind of muddy-coloured. I would advise you to do it. It’s an extraordinary concept: you get drunk from the bottom up. You’re perfectly lucid, talking away: ‘Oh yeah, been there. Yeah. Have you got the time? Oh, is that British time …?’ You’re being very terrific, jet-setting and urbane – until you need to go to the toilet and your legs are pissed. ‘Excuse me, I’ll just go to the toilet—’ Crash! And you can’t get up, you see.

was brought up as a wee Glasgow Catholic. As a consequence, I went to a really weird school: Our Lady of Perpetual Pre-Menstrual Tension. It was fucking hard going, let me tell you.

But, you know, when a man turns fifty, the weirdest and most disappointing thing happens. Your doctor loses interest in your testicles. And takes an overwhelming interest in your arsehole. It’s the strangest thing. Because the chances of testicular cancer recede as you get older, and the chances of prostate cancer increase. Isn’t life a fucking bowl of cherries?

inevitably I think sometimes about my death, but those thoughts go away as quickly as they come. I tend not to dwell on them. Somebody asked me if I wanted to join a suicide society. It’s some organisation in Edinburgh that helps people to commit suicide and I believe that a lot of Parkinson’s sufferers choose that course of action. But I don’t want to. I’m too interested in what is going on around me. In any case, the fuckers didn’t even offer me a lifetime membership. I think life and death is a very simple question that is made far too complex by people who have an axe to grind. I think that when you die, you go to where you were before you were born: nowhere.

They say, ‘Oh, I went up to Scotland once and it was raining.’ Of course it was fucking raining! Where do you think Scotland is – the fucking Pyrenees? Take a raincoat, you stupid fucker!

Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

Some people had a way of colonizing spaces, adapting them to form sanctuaries for themselves. Quayle was such a man. Billy took a seat

My stories are not story shaped, they're me shaped.