Eddie Izzard Quotes

They say that 'Guns don't kill people, people kill people.' Well I think the gun helps. If you just stood there and yelled BANG, I don't think you'd kill too many people.

Cake or death?

What have you been reading, The Gospel according to St. Bastard?!

So the American government lied to the Native Americans for many, many years, and then President Clinton lied about a relationship, and everyone was surprised! A little naïve, I feel!

Father, bless me for I have sinned, I did an original sin… I poked a badger with a spoon.

But with dogs, we do have "bad dog." Bad dog exists. "Bad dog! Bad dog! Stole a biscuit, bad dog!" The dog is saying, "Who are you to judge me? You human beings who’ve had genocide, war against people of different creeds, colors, religions, and I stole a biscuit?! Is that a crime? People of the world!" "Well, if you put it that way, I think you’ve got a point. Have another biscuit, sorry.

They’re not women’s clothes. They’re my clothes. I bought them.

I want to live till I die. No more, no less.

Have you got a flag?

This is not a game of Who The Fuck Are You.

I am an evil Giraffe.

Your eyes flashed fire into my soul. I immediately read the words of Dostoyevsky and Karl Marx, and in the words of Albert Schweitzer, I FANCY YOU!

Scrabble was invented by Nazis to piss off kids with dyslexia.

We will now sing forth, hymn 405, 'Oh God, what on earth is my hairdo all about?

Two languages in one brain? No one can live at that speed!

We stole countries with the cunning use of flags. Just sail around the world and stick a flag in. "I claim India for Britain!" They're going "You can't claim us, we live here! Five hundred million of us!" "Do you have a flag …? "No..." "Well, if you don't have a flag, then you can't have a country. Those are the rules... that I just made up!

If you've never seen an elephant ski, you've never been on acid.

I'm covered in bees!

If there is a God, his plan is very similar to someone not having a plan.

Never put a sock in a toaster.

You piss me off you Salmon... You're too expensive in restaurants.

This is your captain speaking. Welcome aboard flight...one, from...here to there. We'll be cruising at a height of ten feet, going up to twelve and a half feet if we see anything big. And our copilot today is a flask of coffee.

I like my coffee hot and strong. Like I like my women: hot and strong...with a spoon in them.

So in Europe, we had empires. Everyone had them - France and Spain and Britain and Turkey! The Ottoman Empire, full of furniture for some reason. And the Austro-Hungarian Empire, famous for fuck all! Yes, all they did was slowly collapse like a flan in a cupboard.

If you commit perjury I don't care. Don't give a shit. I don't think you should because you grade murder. You have murder One. Murder Two. You realize that there can be a difference in the level of murder. So there must be a difference in the level of perjury. Perjury One is when you're saying there's no Holocaust when, you know, 10 million people have died in it, and Perjury Nine, is when you said you shagged someone and you didn't.

You can't land on the moon and say, "Ooh, it's all sticky! It's covered in jam!

So then there was the Greek, Socrates, he was great... He invented questioning. Before Socrates, no questioning. Everyone sort of went, ''Yeah, I suppose so.

Don’t get somewhere as fast as possible. Get somewhere as good as possible

Cake and tea or death?

We must have been hunters and gatherers but some of us were just waiters and hopers.

Squirrels always eat nuts with two hands, always two hands, "arararar", and occasionally, they stop and go, oh, uh, ah, as if they're going, "Did I leave the gas on? No! I'm, no I'm a fucking squirrel!" And occasionally they go, "Fucking nuts! Fed up with them always. I long for a grapefruit.

You say ‘erbs, and we say herbs… because there’s a fucking ‘h’ in it!

I am a professional transvestite, so I can run about in heels and not fall over. Cause if a woman falls over wearing heels, that’s embarrassing. But if a bloke falls over wearing heels, you have to kill yourself. It’s the end of your life.

Despair is the fuel of terrorism, and hope is the fuel of civilization, so we have to put more hope into the world than despair. Hatred and separation and building walls is not the way to progress. Going backward is not the way to go forward.

I realized that belief is a key ingredient in trying to do things that are difficult.

And then earlier than that there were the crusades. The crusades were totally fucked. Richard the Lionheart, who had the heart of a lion as well as his own. He ripped it out of the lion, and the lion was left with a bicycle pump and not much to do.

Pears can just fuck off too. 'Cause they're gorgeous little beasts, but they're ripe for half an hour, and you're never there. They're like a rock or they're mush. In the supermarket, people banging in nails. "I'll just put these shelves up, mate, then you can have the pear." … So you think, "I'll take them home and they'll ripen up." But you put them in the bowl at home, and they sit there, going, "No! No! Don't ripen yet, don't ripen yet. Wait til he goes out the room! Ripen! Now now now!

Stamina is the big thing you have to learn if you want to achieve success in any kind of career, but especially creative careers.

You notice how they always put the fruit and veg at the entrance to the supermarket? You go in thinking 'this is a fresh shop, everything in here is FRESH! I will do well to shop here'. You never go straight to the bit with the toilet paper, loo brushes and such do you? You'd think 'this is a POO shop! Everything in here is themed on POO!

Mr. Charles Darwin, who looked a bit like God which is interesting, wrote a book called You're a Fucking Monkey, Mate. He played around with the title for a while: We're All Fucking Monkeys; You're a Fucking Monkey, Mate; Get Out of My Face, You Fucking Monkey. And he ended up with On The Origin of Species.

If there is a god they need to come down to Earth and explain WWII, Hitler, bowel cancer, and Croc shoes.

The word itself—dyslexia—is ironically very hard for dyslexic people to spell correctly

I’ve learnt that you’ve got to be really non-apologetic... You’ve got to say, ‘Hi, I’m here, can I have a cup of tea? And one of those biscuits?’ If you say that, it’s fine. If you go in and say, ‘Excuse me, I’m a transvestite, I’ll be in the corner, I won’t be a problem, I’ll face away,’ everyone will go, ‘Oh-oh, problem case in the corner.’ So don’t apologise.

And I think that if God did exist, he had many children. I think Jesus proves this. Jesus must be the seventh son of God. A-sus, B-sus, C-sus, D-sus, E-sus, F-sus, G-sus. That's just logic. That's just mathematical. And T-sus would always be fucking about. And P-sus does deliveries. C-sus started the Roman Empire. Cae-sus. F-sus, City in Turkey. B-sus was covered in something. Some people applauding there; other people going, "What?" ... B-sus was covered in bees.

I've just come to the conclusion that all women should wear whatever they want to wear and that all men should wear whatever they want to wear. If they have a problem with that, they should take it up with United Nations.

Very advanced fashion almost joins up with having no fashion sense at all.

Real life is actually a lot of boring things with occasional spikes of interest. Eddie Izzard

what you do to add to the human existence—that is what matters

No one ever says, “This piece of creative work is crap, but they made it in a couple of weeks, so let’s go and check it out.

I’ll just borrow confidence from a future version of myself.

And there is a rule in every major religion, called the Golden Rule. Essentially: treat other people the way you’d like to be treated yourself. If we all did this, the whole world would work instantaneously. Praying, meditation—fine. But just follow the Golden Rule and the whole world works. Making the world work could be that simple.

I did it on a wing and a prayer, and even though I didn’t have enough confidence to do the show, I had a theory; if I assume I have the confidence, I’ll tell everyone I’m doing it, and then people will come and we’ll actually do it. Once we’ve done it, I’ll have the confidence to do it again. It was some sort of weird positive-thinking confidence mantra because I had to get there.

Pagans they were into sex, death, and religion in an interesting night-time telly type of way.

But stinging nettles: They just love existing, don't they? They're bastards. Stinging nettles are the Nazis of the weed world.

Most people are widely read. I'm thinly read. I've read *** all, and I'm very proud of it.

If you think you can’t do a thing, you will not be able to do it. If you think you can do something, then you have a chance of achieving it. Believing doesn’t mean you will instantly be able to, but you’ve got to believe that you can, otherwise you definitely won’t be able to do it. I’ve seen a number of people who I thought could do something brilliant and creative but they didn’t seem to believe in themselves and therefore didn’t, or couldn’t, do it.

We need to become more open minded to the idea that many of us exist on a spectrum - a continuum - of gender. That for some of us the choice isn't just one or the other - completely male or completely female - but often a combination of both. In fact, it seems there are three different lines on the sexuality spectrum: how you self identify, who you're attracted to, and what you look like. And it seems the dial can be at any place on any of those three lines.

Cuando llegamos a la Luna, ese fue el momento en que Dios debió haber venido y decir "hola". Porque si inventas algunas criaturas, los pones en azul y llegan al gris, es el jodido momento de aparecer y decir "bien hecho".

It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized you could buy a packet of cereal with a free gift and then just stick your hand in and root around in the packet until you found the free thing. It seems a much simpler way. But that took me about fifteen years to work out.

If you are an LGBT+ person and you come out, you have to go through your knight’s quest to create ground for yourself, to create a space for yourself, to stand there and say, “I exist. I have no reason to feel guilt or shame. I am proud to exist, and while I’m not perfect, I deserve to exist in society just like anyone else.” This became my first big fight. While I consider myself to be fantastically boring, I realized that if I took on my own sexual identity and came out and just told people about it and tried to have a chat with them—tried to be offhand and casual about it—and tried to build our place in society and humanity, then that would be a good mission. This is where I exist in society. I am just this guy. I am transgender, and I exist. But that is just my sexuality. More important than that is that I perform comedy, I perform drama, I run marathons, and I’m an activist in politics. These are the things I do. How you self-identify with your sexuality matters not one wit. What you do in life—what you do to add to the human existence—that is what matters. That is the beautiful thing.

[Bill] Gates said he connected with [Eddy] Izzard even though it would appear they have nothing in common — but that might be the point the author is trying to communicate. "I've recently discovered that I have a lot in common with a funny, dyslexic, transgender actor, comedian, escape artist, unicyclist, ultra-marathoner, and pilot from Great Britain. Except all of the above," Gates wrote. "We're all cut from the same cloth. In his words, 'We are all totally different, but we are all exactly the same

How easily men could make things much better than they are – if they only all tried together!’ Winston Churchill, 1909

Jesus sandals

I think this should be called non-victim behavior. A surprise offer of bright cheeriness and self-confidence on people who were probably about to say negative things to you, in order to make you a non-victim and just a member of society.

If you are an LGBT+ person and you come out, you have to go through your knight's quest to create ground for yourself, to stand there and say, 'I exist. I have no reason to feel guilt or shame. I am proud to exist, and while I'm not perfect, I deserve to exist in society just like anyone else.

Could adults actually deal with a weird monster under their bed? I think if the monster started moving around, then- well we'd get out of bed and we'd get a frying pan, and then we'd beat the crap out of the monster under the bed. Or we'd get a broom and poke the monster out. No, we'd lock the door and set fire to the house.

I had the luxury of knowing what I wanted to do. So I just sat on the bed and came up with a plan for myself: "I have to go to the Edinburgh Fringe. But I don't have the confidence to do a production there because I've never gone before, and I don't even know how to get there or what to do once I get there. So I will just act as if I do have the confidence to go to the Edinburgh Fringe. I'll just borrow confidence from a future version of myself. Once I've been to the Edinburgh Fringe and performed a show there, then I will have the confidence to go to the Edinburgh Fringe. I will go to the bank manager of confidence (in some part of my brain) and I will borrow that confidence from the future, and then I can wear it like a cloak, and I will talk to everyone with this confidence." It was out there as a concept, but it worked.

The twenty-first century is a key century for us on this planet. Either we make a world, where all seven billion people have a fair chance in this century - or forget it. If we can't do this, I don't think we are going to make it as a species. Despair is the fuel of terrorism, and hope is the fuel of civilization, so we have to put more hope into the world than despair. Hatred and separation and building walls is not the way to progress. Going backward is not the way to go forward.

I consider myself a spiritual atheist. I don't believe in a god but I believe in us - human beings. And I believe there is more goodwill than ill will in the world. If you look at all the religions in the world, they have broadly two components: there are that religion's philosophies and rules for life (which you can agree with or disagree with - applying one's common sense), and then on top of them there is a mysticism. A mystical god that you can never see or meet. If you remove the mysticism, then there are just the philosophies and rules for life that you can agree with or disagree with. I encourage you to remove the mysticism and just apply common sense to the ideas. And there is a rule in every major religion, called the Golden Rule. Essentially: treat other people the way you'd like to be treated yourself. If we all did this, the whole world would work instantaneously. Praying, meditation - fine. But just follow the Golden Rule and the whole world works. Making the world work could be that simple.

You know, I don't believe that religions are religions. No, I believe they are philosophies with some good ideas and some fuckin' weird ones.

Paul McCartney was at the microphone singing Ricky Nelson’s “Lonesome Town” to an almost empty Royal Albert Hall. Many of the other performers on the bill were waiting to rehearse but had melted away to the edges of the auditorium to give him some space. Neil Finn was talking to Johnny Marr, Sinéad O’Connor was there with her son, and the emcee for the night, Eddie Izzard, was looking over the running order with Chrissie Hynde. George Michael arrived quietly and was waiting patiently for his turn to sing.

You stick a wooden stake through the heart of your failures and they become successes.

Despair is the fuel of terrorism, and hope is the fuel of civilization,

Even though America loves baseball, (American) football, and basketball, I feel it is the ultimate American game, really, because it’s a pure meritocracy, and that is what America was designed as.

It doesn’t matter what sex or sexuality, how you identify or who you fancy - it matters not one whit. What do you do in life? What do you create? What do you add to the human existence - that is what matters.

You're analog players in a digital world.

If you are an LGBT+ person and you come out, you have to go through your knight’s quest to create ground for yourself, to create a space for yourself, to stand there and say, “I exist. I have no reason to feel guilt or shame. I am proud to exist, and while I’m not perfect, I deserve to exist in society just like anyone else.

That’s why I don’t like the word dysphoria. I refuse to be confused about this. It’s confusing, but I am trying to be not confused. Which is why I made up my own terminology—being in “girl mode” or “boy mode”—it’s how I describe where I am on any given day on that nonbinary continuum of gender identity, a concept that psychiatrists and sociologists and politicians and religious types don’t seem able to explain with any degree of medical or biological certainty why I wish to wear skirts and heels on certain days and trousers on others. I don’t know why, and neither do they. And I suppose, in the end, the why of it really doesn’t matter. It’s just who I am and the way I was born. That’s who a lot of us are and the way a lot of us were born.