Billy Connolly Quotes

If you haven't heard a good rumour by 11:00am, start one.

I love fishing. It's transcendental meditation with a punchline.

I just believe in the movie. I don't care what the book was like. I don't care what the previous film was like or other films were like. I care only about the script I've got.

I was brought up as a Catholic. I've got A-level guilt.

I like Dali and Magritte. I also like the Scottish artist John Byrne, another surrealist.

If you don't know how to meditate at least try to spend some time every day just sitting.

Once you become successful, people know where you live, the type of house you live in, the kind of car you drive, the clothes you wear, and so it would be patronising to go and talk like a welder. Welding's a mystery to me now. You can't go back, your life changes every day.

I'm a big fan of the Mars Bar Diet. You don't eat the Mars bar, you stick it up your arse and let a rottweiler chase you home.

When I was 12, we went from Glasgow to Aberdeen on a school trip. It was called fresh air fortnight.

I've always wanted to go to Switzerland to see what the army does with those wee red knives.

I hate those earnest TV documentaries that are the world according to people with glasses who know better than you.

The world needs more Edwin Morgans, people who can take the language and swing it round their heads and don't care what you think.

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!

It seems to me that Islam and Christianity and Judaism all have the same god, and he's telling them all different things.

I'm actually pale blue: it takes me a week of sunbathing to turn white.

I used to have Mad Cow's disease, but I'm alright Nooooooooow.

The human race has been set up. Someone, somewhere, is playing a practical joke on us. Apparently, women need to feel loved to have sex. Men need to have sex to feel loved. How do we ever get started.

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.

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.

Why are there no windows in the toilets on aeroplanes? To protect you from the most dedicated perverts on the planet, hanging off the wing to get a peep?

Where do you go when you die? The same place you were before you were born; nowhere! It's over!

I don't understand art-speak. My pictures are big doodles. I'm amazed what people come up with when they look at them. There's one of a figure with two heads that somebody thought must be a comment on the state of matrimony. None of it is a comment on anything.

What always staggers me is that when people blow their noses, they always look into their hankies to see what came out. What do they expect to find?

Try to live in a place you like.

A mate of mine has just told me he's shagging his girlfriend and her twin, I said how can you tell them apart, he said "her brothers got a moustache!"

I decided to stop drinking while it was still my idea.

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

People who announce they are going to the toilet. Thanks that's an image I really didn't need.

Outgrew the media ... The negativity felt like a disease.

A fart is just your arse applauding.

Don't die until you're dead.

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?

Wisdom isn't an old guy on top of a mountain in a loin cloth. It isn't an answer. It's a question.

Honestly some folk will take offence at anything, I met a bloke with no legs this morning while at the bus stop, all I asked was "How are you getting on?"

I used to be a folk singer, but I was ... dreadful. I had a voice like a goose farting in the fog. And being a folk singer doesn't make you attractive to women.

Now the country is in a terrible state and you've blamed it on a number of things - unemployment rate, the value of the pound, and all that. It's actually because the national anthem is boring.

When you're eating something and someone asks 'Is that nice?' No it's really revolting - I always eat stuff I hate.

I don't aim to offend.

I spent the whole time battering people I liked and singing with my arm round people I loathed.

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

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.

I was brought up a Catholic, for that you get an A level in guilt.

I'm not going to throw away the hand of friendship to suit 100 Trotskyites in Glasgow.

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.

Avoid people who say they know the answer. Keep the company of people who are trying to understand the question.

I love Los Angeles. It reinvents itself every two days.

As soon as I got successful, the Scottish press started picking on me. It's something they reserve just for me.

Ally MacLeod thinks that tactics are a new kind of mint.

I worry about ridiculous things, you know, how does a guy who drives a snowplough get to work in the morning ... That can keep me awake for days..

I became a welder. I was actually becoming an Engineer and I joined the wrong queue. And so I became a welder, without knowing what a welder was.

I'm a huge film star ... but you have to hurry to the movies, because I usually die in the first 15 f
ing minutes. I'm the only guy I know who died in a f
ing Muppet movie.

If I had a hammer, there'd be no more folksingers.

Fuck the begrudgers

[To audience members who were arriving late] You haven't missed a thing, I was just killing time 'til you got here

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

I set out to be a cross between Lenny Bruce and Robert the Bruce - my main thrust was the body and its functions and malfunctions - the absurdity of the thing.

My advice to you, if you want to lose a bit of weight: don't eat anything that comes in a bucket. Buckets are the kitchen utensils of the farmyard.

Never trust anybody with only one book.

I'm one of the school of people who don't do research of the reality of the thing or the unreality of the thing. In all the movies I've done, I've never done any research.

Don't work out, work in.

Don't buy one of those baby intercoms. Babies pretend to be dead. They're bastards, and they do it on purpose.

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.

Why do they call it an asteroid when it's outside the hemisphere, but call it a haemorrhoid when it's on the outside of your ass?

And then there was my mate who'd just been fitted with a brand new hearing aid. "It's the best in the world", he said. "What type is it?", I asked and he said "ten past twelve".

,000 people in Hampden Park. Of course they're all Scottish. Because no one else goes there. The English have an unwritten rule: they only go to places they might get back from.

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.

The more you know the less the better.

I've come in and out of America for ... well, I've lived here for 15 years. And I've played here for nearly 30 years. On and off. But I've always played to my fan base. And I can come and do two or three nights in New York or two or three nights in L.A., and all that. But when I go away, nobody knows I've been gone. You know, I don't get reviewed or anything like that. So that's why I've come back and done a longer time in a smaller place, in New York. It's always the people who live here that get a chance to know me.

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

I don't like the beach. I think we have no business at the beach at all, as a species. We don't belong in the sea. The sea is full of things that bite us, sting us, hurt the soles of our feet, and it's extremely cold. When are we gonna take the hint that the things that live in the sea don't like us?

People who are willing to get off their arse to search the entire room for the TV remote because they refuse to walk to the TV and change the channel manually.

Well, the film's not only pricking the pomposity of the Church, it's pricking the pomposity, and sometimes you would think fraudulence, of the insurance companies. I had never read anything like this until I was doing the film, but Mark [Joffe, the director] and people showed me stuff where, like a flood, it mattered where the water came from. If you're flooded from above, you get the money; if you're flooded from below, you don't. What's that about?

I hate all those weathermen, too, who tell you that rain is bad weather. There's no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothing, so get yourself a sexy raincoat and live a little.

Learn to feel sorry for music because, although it is the international language, it has no swear words.

I've been a poser for f
ing years. I say, pose your arse off. You know, have a laugh.

The religion in Scotland is one of the most patronising things ... after the weather.

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

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'.

American sex shops are the most bizarre. They sell these inflatable dolls, but they also sell just the head
supposedly for people to drive along the highway with.

Tread gently on anyone who looks at you sideways.

I loathe hecklers. I haven't got a good syllable to say. When you come out of the club circuit and into the concert hall, they should be gone. There's an element of manners that should tell you that the ticket is dear and it's a different venue.

When you are waiting for the bus and someone asks, "Has the bus come yet?". If the bus came would I be standing here?

If Jesus was a Jew, how come he has a Mexican first name?

There's nothing better than a fight, especially when you're watching it from a safe place. You can yell encouragement! Hit him with the left, he's a big Jessie!

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.

Don't vote, it only encourages them.

Who discovered we could get milk from cows, and what did he THINK he was doing at the time?

I still do my comedy and my performance stuff and my acting so it's not all-consuming. But I do find myself drawing more and more these days.

Behind the proscenium arch, you can't always hear what people in the audience are saying.

Oh aye ... my Father would thrash me every now and then. He'd talk while he did it too! He'd hit me and shout, 'Have ye had enough?' Had enough? Whit kind of question is that? 'Why, Father, would another kick in the balls be out of the question???'

Did your mother never tell you not to drink on an empty head?

I don't have wild dogs chasing people with scripts away from my door. I get my share. I've done okay. But I usually do independent stuff because that's mostly what I'm offered.

I have been made redundant before and it is a terrible blow; redundant is a rotten word because it makes you think you are useless.

It's my mind, and I reserve the right to change it as often as I like.

If you want to lose a bit of weight, don't eat anything out of a bucket.

I've always been fascinated by the difference between the jokes you can tell your friends but you can't tell to an audience. There's a fine line you have to tread because you don't know who is out there in the auditorium. A lot of people are too easily offended.

I loved Japan. I used to read a lot about it when I was a child. And I always wanted to go. And it was delightful. I absolutely loved it. What a smashing place.

Never run with scissors or other pointy objects.

So, have you heard about the oyster who went to a disco and pulled a mussel?

I once travelled to Adelaide on Emu Airways. I was 5,000 ft up in the air when someone pointed out to me that emus can't fly