Dudley Moore Quotes

Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets.

I'm always looking for meaningful one-night stands

The best car safety device is a rear view mirror with a cop in it.

24. The Rutles, “Cheese and Onions” (1978) A legend to last a lunchtime. The Rutles were the perfect Beatle parody, starring Monty Python’s Eric Idle and the Bonzos’ Neil Innes in their classic mock-doc All You Need Is Cash, with scene-stealing turns by George Harrison, Mick Jagger, and Paul Simon. (Interviewer: “Did the Rutles influence you at all?” Simon: “No.” Interviewer: “Did they influence Art Garfunkel?” Simon: “Who?”) “Cheese and Onions” is a psychedelic ersatz Lennon piano ballad so gorgeous, it eventually got bootlegged as a purported Beatle rarity. Innes captures that tone of benignly befuddled pomposity—“I have always thought in the back of my mind / Cheese and onions”—along with the boyish vulnerability that makes it moving. Hell, he even chews gum exactly like John. The Beatles’ psychedelic phase has always been ripe for parody. Witness the 1967 single “The L.S. Bumble Bee,” by the genius Brit comedy duo Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, from Beyond the Fringe and the BBC series Not Only . . . ​But Also, starring John Lennon in a cameo as a men’s room attendant. “The L.S. Bumble Bee” sounds like the ultimate Pepper parody—“Freak out, baby, the Bee is coming!”—but it came out months before Pepper, as if the comedy team was reeling from Pet Sounds and wondering how the Beatles might respond. Cook and Moore are a secret presence in Pepper—when the audience laughs in the theme song, it’s taken from a live recording of Beyond the Fringe, produced by George Martin.

Like every boy, I really wanted a pet. But I was allergic to animal hair. I realize having “allergies” doesn’t help my street cred, either. But this might: I ended up living amongst reptiles. That’s cool, right? I first got the idea while lizard hunting with Uncle Frankie when I was 10. We caught a black and yellow-striped garter snake and I kept that for a while. Later, I acquired a six-foot Burmese python and named him Dudley, after Dudley Moore, my co-star in the film Like Father, Like Son. The cast of Growing Pains gave me a red-tailed boa constrictor for my birthday one year and I named that one Glenn, after my cool set teacher. I had another red-tailed boa that I named Springsteen, named for—well, you can probably guess.

Bernard was afraid of loud voices. He was afraid of the dark. He was afraid of his brother, Dudley, who tried to make a man of him, and he was afraid of his sister, Joan, who threw him in the lake and held his head under the water to make him swim. When Barnard spoke to the maids, he did it quietly and he said “please” and “thank you”--and sometimes, though he was a boy and a Taverner, he cried. His father, of course, was desperate. A boy like Bernard had never happened in his family before. He sent him away to the toughest school he could find, but though the teachers caned him even more than his father had done, and the boys did interesting things to him like squeezing lemon juice into his eyes and piercing the soles of his feet with compass needles, it seemed to make no difference. Bernard went on being quiet, and he went on being terrified of his family, and he went on saying “please” and “thank you” to the maids. But there were some things Bernard was not afraid of. He was not afraid of spiders--when the servants screamed because there was a large one in the bath, it was to Bernard they went, and he would put a glass over it and let it out in the garden, admiring its furry legs and complicated eyes. He was not afraid of the adders that hissed on the moor. He liked the adders with their zigzag markings and flickering tongues. Bernard did not mind the rats in the cellars and he did not mind the horses. He minded the people on the horses--his sister, Joan, with her braying voice and his brother, Dudley, with his whip--but if he met the horses quietly in a field he got on well enough with them.

The influence of the mid-to-late-Sixties English counterculture is clearer in The Beatles’ music than in that of any of their rivals. This arose from a conflux of links, beginning with their introduction by Brian Epstein to the film director Richard Lester, continuing with McCartney’s friendships with Miles and John Dunbar, and culminating in the meeting of Lennon and Yoko Ono. Through Lester and his associates - who included The Beatles’ comedy heroes Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers - the group’s consciousness around the time of Sgt. Pepper was permeated by the anarchic English fringe theatre, with its penchant for Empire burlesque (e.g., The Alberts, Ivor Cutler, Milligan and Antrobus’s The Bed Sitting Room). This atmosphere mingled with contemporary strains from English Pop Art and Beat poetry; the ‘happenings’ and experimental drama of The People Show, Peter Brook’s company, and Julian Beck’s Living Theatre; the improvised performances of AMM and what later became the Scratch Orchestra; the avant-garde Euro-cinema of Fellini and Antonioni; and the satire at Peter Cook’s Establishment club and in his TV show with Dudley Moore, Not Only . . . But Also (in which Lennon twice appeared). From the cultural watershed of 1965-6 onwards, The Beatles’ American heroes of the rock-and-roll Fifties gave way to a kaleidoscopic mélange of local influences from the English fringe arts and the Anglo-European counterculture as well as from English folk music and music-hall.

Aren't waiters wonderful? You ask them for things and they bring them... It's the same principle as Santa Claus.

I understand that one person in 100,000 suffers from the disease and I am also aware that there are 100,000 members of my union, the Screen Actors Guild, who are working every day. I think, therefore, it is in some way considerate of me that I have taken on the disease for myself, thus protecting the remaining 99,999 members from this fate.

And late late late when he thought they had gone—or he had gone— to sleep maybe, to a place inside his head where they couldn’t reach him, in the dark, he opened his eyes, and next to him sat Anthony. Alexander shut his eyes, not wanting Anthony to see all the things he was carrying, and Anthony leaned deeply in and lowered his forehead onto Alexander’s bandaged chest. “Dad,” he whispered, “I swear to God, you have to stop it. You’ve been doing this for weeks now, turning away every time you look at me. Please. Stop. I’m hurt enough. Think of yourself, remember your-self—did you want my mother to turn her face from you when you came back from war? Please. I don’t give a fuck about the arm. I don’t. I’m not like Nick Moore. I’m like Mom. I’ll adjust, little by little. I’m just glad to be alive, to be back. I thought my life was over. I didn’t think I would ever come back, Dad,” said Anthony, raising his head. “What are you so upset about? It wasn’t even my good arm.” He smiled lightly. “I never liked it. Couldn’t pitch ball with it, couldn’t write with it. Certainly, unlike you, couldn’t shoot fucking Dudley with it. Now come on. Please.” “Yes,” whispered Alexander. “But you’ll never play guitar again.” And other things you will never do. Play basketball. Pitch. Hold your newborn baby in your palms. Anthony swallowed. “Or go to war again.” He broke off. “I know. I have some adjusting to do. It is what it is. Mom says this, and you should listen to her. She says I got away with my life, and I’m going to do just fine. All we want is for you to be all right,” Anthony said. “That’s all any of us ever wanted.” “Antman,” said Alexander, his hand on his son’s lowered head, his wounded chest drawn and quartered, “you’re a good kid.