Denis Leary Quotes

It became sort of a snowball effect, with guys trying to deal in their own way with 9/11, whether it was drinking or whatever,

Most people don't know how underpaid and often ill-equipped urban fire departments are across North America.

The things that make me angry still make me angry. George Carlin is 67, and he's still as funny as he's ever been, and he's still angry. And that makes me feel good, because I feel like if I stick around long enough, I'll still be able to work.

White men have screwed this country up! I would like a black, female ... . everything all rolled into one.I want something different. I want a real change. People, I want a president who speaks well, who has a sense of humor. This guy is such a moron! It's beyond the point where it's a joke. He's an idiot.

I write what I think is funny and I write from a sense of popping a balloon or a sense of injustice, whether it's about yourself, or whether it's about something else. It's my worldview; it doesn't mean that everybody has to agree with it.

I studied acting in school and then, of course, couldn't get an acting job.

Everything you look at now, the scripts that come in that you look at, the television scripts are way better than the movie script. The talent is going to television.

We didn't have rehab back in the Seventies. Back in the Seventies, rehab meant you stopped doing coke, but you kept smoking pot and drinking for a couple more weeks.

There's nothing wrong with an actor that can't improvise, but if you're going to improvise, you gotta make sure you got people that can play the game.

The thing with movies is, because you have so little time, I always feel like there are more things we could've done with the character. If we'd done a sequel to 'The Thomas Crown Affair,' what would that have been like? But for the most part, you try not to think of that, because it's just going to break your heart.

I'm a lapsed Catholic in the best sense of the word.

Where I grew up, the basketball courts were rarely used.

One of those things that I like about TV is that if you get a group of people you like, you can work with these people for months at a time, and you can discover their strengths and weaknesses, and you can use those in the direction where you take the characters.

George Carlin was great right up to the end of his life. But Richard Pryor was probably the best, most gifted stand-up comedian who will ever live.

I take music pretty seriously. You see that scar on my wrist? You see that? You know where that's from? I heard the Bee Gees were getting back together again. I couldn't take it, OK!

If I'm president, there are going to be government vans that drive around and pick up people who shouldn't be wearing certain clothing. Talk about lack of civil rights - I'm sorry, I'm pulling you right off the street, and we're giving you clothes that you're going to be O.K. in.

I'm pretty much a chocolate guy. I'm up for any type of chocolate. Any chocolate.

How many whales do we really need? I figure five. One for each ocean.

I think it's a shame when you come across young actors and musicians who haven't had the time to learn their craft. It doesn't matter if it's acting or music; you really have to learn how to do it from the bottom up because unless you have a great work ethic ... fame is a terrible thing to have.

"Yeah, well, if you eat red meat, it stays in your colon for fifteen years!" Good! I paid for it; I want it in my ass, okay? I want them to find a meat sweater from my esophagus to my asshole when they open me up in the end! "This guy's covered in meat! He's Meat-Man! He's Meat-Tracheotomy-Man!"

Jerry Lewis has been married twenty times. He gets married on a Tuesday, they find his wife dead in a swimming pool on Thursday. Maybe if you married someone who's old enough to swim next time, Ok Jerry?

I really, really like 'Eastbound & Down.' It's one of the few things that makes me laugh. It's almost too funny to get an award.

The filter's the best part. That's where they put the heroin.

If you want a long-term relationship that doesn't require a lot of work, I say, get a dog. They love you no matter what. But when it comes to humans, there's no secret; you really have to appreciate the person every single day.

Peter Falk and Denis Leary today walked into a Starbucks and shot 27 people, without any announcement whatsoever.

I tried eating vegetarian. I felt like a wimp going into a restaurant. "What do you want to eat sir? Broccoli?" Broccoli's a side dish, folks. Always was, always will be, OK! When they ask me what I want, I say: What do you think I want? This is America. I want a bowl of raw red meat right now.

I'm really happy I went to a Catholic school because a lot of the repressive tactics they use make for great senses of humor.

The biggest battle for a lot of people who come out of the theater, which is where I was trained, is that they can never forget that a camera is pointed at them.

When I first got famous, Greg Dulli was also just starting to cook with the Afghan Whigs, and because of the MTV awards I met Dave Grohl and Nirvana and all these rock and roll bands. So I had experience with what it was like when people were taking off at that time.

There's a method aspect to Campbell Scott character and he really wants to get into his character and he wants to cast to go on a fast so that by the time the play opens nobody's eaten in three days because he wants the audience to feel the pain from the stage.

I do have to say that I think that President Obama is the greatest President in the history of all of our Presidents, and that he can do no wrong in my book. So how's that for prejudice on the Democratic side?

I went to school with Steven Wright, who was the shyest guy I knew, and one day someone suddenly told me that he was in a club doing standup comedy. I went down to his club and he was great. Another friend of mine, who was pretty much a thief by trade, was hosting the show. So I thought, 'If these guys can do it, then so can I.'

Racism isn't born, folks. It's taught. I have a 2-year-old son. Know what he hates? Naps. End of list.

I'm not really a Spider-Man fan. I'm more of a Batman guy.

I did 12 years with nuns, you know. So I came out of it going, like, 'I think Jesus is all right.' The rest of it I think stinks to the high heavens.

I'd love to do another television series. I really love the writing process, and as an actor I really like how much you get to examine in television.

My career plan at this point is 'Ice Age 5' through '10,' and even '12,' and 'Spider Man' - you know, basically I'd be Emma Stone's dad for the rest of my career. I really don't have any problem doing that.

First of all, I have to have trucks because I live most of my time on a horse farm, so I've gotta have trucks. It's in the northeast; I've got to have pickup trucks to move snow, number one. Number two, just if I'm driving, I don't have to have an SUV, but I want a big car.

Usually when you watch a film, you're just sort of biting your nails about things you could have done differently.

I bought my daughter a Chihuahua and I fell in love with it. So now I carry Coco around with me all the time.

Heavy Metal fans are buying Heavy Metal records, taking the records home, listening to the records and then blowing their heads off with shotguns? Where's the problem? That's an unemployment solution right there, folks! It's called natural selection.

Kids are incredibly expensive. But it pays off later when they are better educated, bigger, and better-looking than you. And find you incessantly boring and uncool.

I wasn't the best student. I wasn't stupid, but I wasn't paying a lot of attention.

Good actors, especially when they know their character, will come in and either tell you in advance that they have an idea, or in the middle of the rehearsal or the scene they'll let it loose and you go, 'Ah that's great.'

I believe in prescription drugs. I believe in feeling better.

No woman can be completely happy at any one moment in time. They're always anticipating the next thing to argue or complain about.

No matter what anybody says, relationships are based on physical attraction. The first time I saw my wife, it was pure animal whatever.

I wanted a more female point of view.

Let me tell you something: I love the Yankees. And let me tell you why: because without the Yankees, there is nobody to hate.

Stand-up comedy and comedy in general is the ultimate form of free speech, because you get to poke holes in all the pretentious bubbles politicians and pundits and popes and pretenders try to float over our heads.

My goal is to leave this planet with the biggest carbon footprint I can possibly leave.

Here's the problem with Easter. The Catholic Church needs to pick a date because it keeps moving. And I think the reason they always have Easter moving to different dates is to catch us.

I'm the enemy because I like to think. I like to read. I'm into freedom of speech and freedom of choice. I'm the kind of guy that could sit in a greasy spoon and wonder, gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecue ribs or the side order of gravy fries? I want high cholesterol. I would eat bacon and butter and buckets of cheese. Okay? I want to smoke Cuban cigars the size of Cincinnati in the nonsmoking section. I want to run through the streets naked with green Jell-O all over my body reading Playboy magazine. Why? Because I might suddenly feel the need to. Okay, pal?

Did you ever notice they never take any fat hostages? You never see a guy coming out of Lebanon going: I was held hostage for seven months and I lost 175 pounds, I feel good and I look good and I learned self-discipline. That's the important thing.

If you see me doing a new stand-up special, it probably means I've been out of work for a while.

When I was a teenager, you couldn't get straight pants. Then in '76, when punk started to hit, it was a revelation that you could find straight pants again.

I've always had a thing for Catwoman. Michelle Pfeiffer or Halle Berry in tight leather pants, with the boots - I'm pretty good with either one.

What firefighters and people in our military and cops do is separate from what the rest of us do; basically these people say, 'I'm going to protect all these strangers.'

You can have good writing, but a great actor will make it feel and sound like great writing. You can have great writing, and mediocre actors will make it feel mediocre. Without the actors, you have nothing.

Liz [Gillies] doesn't really listen to anything new, besides Adele, Ariana Grande, and stuff like that. She loves '70s music and old '60s songs. She loves songwriters from the '70s that I hate, like Jim Croce and James Taylor, and she loves Stevie Nicks and old jazz classics.

I would never do crack ... I would never do a drug named after a part of my own ass, okay?

Hockey's my favorite sport.

I was working with Peter Tolan, who was my writing partner on those two [Rescue Me and The Job], and he did The Larry Sanders Show with Garry Shandling, and he always said that the second season is better because you know the actors.

You can't teach somebody how to be funny. You're either funny, or you ain't.

I like to give the actors freedom to take what we have on the page and improve on it. And they do that quite a bit.

I needed someone really intense, but also somebody with a lot of theatrical credibility.

I love French stuff. Mmmm, french fries.

I'm really good at laundry, and I have no problem cleaning the kitchen.

I'm sick and tired of our generation being called the TV generation. What do you expect? We watched Lee Harvey Oswald get his brains blown out all over. How could we change the channel after that?

If you're over 52 years old and you're on Facebook, do us all a favor and log off now.

The second season is genrtrally easier do because you know the actors better and they know the characters better and if everybody likes each other you can really go all types of places.

Wolfhounds helped kill off the wolves in Ireland.

Don't buy the toys that make the noise!

Anthony Mackie in 'The Hurt Locker' is everything an actor can hope to be. So rock steady in his portrayal that you immediately forget every performance he may have previously given, and focus only on the character in front of you.

The Social Wishlist on Facebook is a great example of everything right about social media.

I try and shoot as often as a can, I cross shoot. I have at least two cameras rolling at the same time. So I'll have two actors or two sets of actors at a time so everybody's basically on camera. So when they improvise we have everybody's coverage. And you can then go in the editing room and find the energy still stays there.

Campbell [Scott] also directed me in a film with Hope Davis called Final. That was the first thing we did together, but I've known him for years.

I love to smoke. I smoke seven thousand packs a day!

Jon Stewart is exactly the same guy he's always been, only with money. He knows that the moment he really believes he's important, the funny goes away and he becomes Bill O'Reilly, except shorter and Jewish.

I obviously identify with the anti-authority figure. I've pretty much always had problems with authority, ever since I was a kid.

Loud, stupid and overeating will suffice as long as we also have the funny, the fierce and the intellectual

Doing the same character over and over, it gets boring.

I don't really have a lot of fun playing just straight good guys. It's not my thing. It's like Tom Hanks territory.

Having dealt with a lot of real firefighters, I know there are a lot of guys who, for lack of a better term, become addicted to the grief because it has kept them connected to these guys that they felt responsible for having lost.

I think we're going to carry the 'Ice Age's up to 'Ice Age 15,' which means basically they'll be in the present decade.

Ann Romney talking about middle class moms is like Chris Christie talking about a salad

It's hard to have a film and television career and do music work at the same time.

Elvis and I call up Cadillac dealerships all night long, suckin' down Ny Quil stingers and cheese. He says, what the hell's Lisa Marie thinking with that Michael Jackson crap?

I think we should take Iraq and Iran and combine them into one country and call it Irate. All the pissed off people live in one place and get it over with.

I'm no day at the beach. And if it is a beach, it's Hampton Beach. Ever been there? It's not nice.

All men hear is blah, blah, blah, blah, SEX, blah, blah, blah, FOOD, blah, blah, blah, BEER.

I'm no prophet and I'm no genius, but I can only tell you what I seem to know. As a fan of television and the movies, I think it's all for the better.

I'm praying for 'Ice Age' 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10. Because I really think we can run those characters into the '60s, and I'm talking the 1960s, you know? The Civil Rights Movement. That's what I'm praying for, because then I wouldn't have to do anything else.

I'm gonna get one of those tracheotomies, so I can smoke two cigarettes at the same time! I'm gonna get nine tracheotomies, all around my neck, I'll be Tracheotomy Man! He can smoke a pack
at a time, he's Tracheotomy Man!

I think daycare is great for people who have to work two jobs. My problem is with people who are dropping kids off at daycare because they want to go out and spend the day golfing or getting their nails done. You know what I mean? That's not why they invented daycare.

I love to smoke. I love to eat red meat. I'll only eat red meat that comes from cows who smoke, ok!? Special cows they grow in Virginia with voice boxes in their necks. "Moo"

Happiness comes in small doses folks. It's a cigarette butt, or a chocolate chip cookie or a five second orgasm. You come, you smoke the butt you eat the cookie you go to sleep wake up and go back to fucking work the next morning, THAT'S IT! End of fucking list!

I don't believe in the power of words.

I wanted to get more serialized. I had this idea for an event that would click onto everybody's mortality. I said, "I want somebody to die." Fortunately for me, when I was toying with that idea, John Landgraf, who's the head of FX but also a very smart executive, came up with the idea of the ashes in the maracas. He called me up and said, "Listen, what about this, they get the ashes in a box and when they get them, they shake them and they sound like maracas." And I was like, "Okay, now I've got my throughline."

For us as writers, it's really important to have songs we believe in - even before sometimes we shoot a scene. If we have a song that's so perfectly designed for a scene on 'Rescue Me,' we'll play it on loud speakers during the shooting. It helps the cameraman and it helps the director, and it helps the actors know what the feel is.