Dylan Moran

You can't please everyone, nor should you seek to, because then you won't please anyone, least of all yourself.

You achieve the surreal jokes through the realism by making it elastic.

The truth is that I'm constitutionally incapable of doing an ordinary job.

Paper acts as an eraser on the mind, as soon as you look at what you've written.

Paper acts as an eraser on the mind, as soon as you look at what you've written.

Maybe this is just me, but as time goes by, I'm more bewildered by modernity. It gets more unfathomable with every passing year.

I'm fascinated by how you'll change your position so many times over a lifetime, but really what you're doing is occupying a series of positions on a landscape.

When I was a child, I wanted to watch things that made me laugh. It's attacking boredom, as simple as that. I was 19 when I first went to a comedy club - I wanted to do it, so I gave it a try and that was it. I found my office.

One thing thats coming up a lot is are you as grumpy as you appear from this Black Books thing.

Irish people give big hellos and very little goodbyes. Unless they're female, and then they spend five hours talking in the doorway to the person that's leaving their house.

Do your own thing. Speak in your voice.

What is universal can be surprising. Over time you find the kind of stuff which has people thinking 'That is just something that occurred to me... there's something wrong with me', is in fact stuff that is universal.

I thought The Office was good, though I didn't think of it as a sitcom, just as a very good programme.

I never really had a career, to be honest with you. I never in my life sat down and planned it. I have thought, 'Oh, I'd like to do this,' like anybody would. But I'm not the type that says, 'If I do this, it will lead to that.'

I've seen stand up comedy, and after a while you start to notice that a lot of people are doing things that are like a lot of other people. There can be a bit of a herd mentality, and that's obviously less interesting because there's less going on. I'm just being totally frank with you.

Vodka is a very deceptive drink. You can't taste it, you can't smell it.

My drive to put myself on the line comes from boredom. From that feeling when you go to bed and think, 'What did I do today?' It doesn't have to be something monumental, just a feeling that you really tried to look at something, or look into something.

I fear we might be losing the basic human facility to be alone - and with that you throw out independent decision-making, what to trust, what not to trust; key stuff - a perilous loss.

I don't want to do panel games or adverts. I really like challenges. I always get roles as an art teacher or a photographer. In the future I want to play something like a mugger/assassin/pastry chef.

I wanted to show off - a simple impulse or drive; in much the same way as some kids wanted to play football, I wanted to show off. Not complicated in that sense, very natural; it just depends on how you want to show off.

If you're a comic, you don't have a rehearsal room; you rehearse on stage. My main concern is remembering everything. I've written lots of material, but how do you memorise 90 minutes? That's one hell of a long speech. I've always had problems with that.

Stand-up came naturally to me because people in Ireland talk. But that's not talking on panel shows; it is structured fun. It reminds me of some tragic aunt clapping her hands and bouncing into a room and announcing we should all play games... and if we don't we are all a rotten spoilsport.

I was lucky in the sense that I was never blessed with an overly reflective nature.

I grew up in a house where there was lots of teasing and language play and laughter; it was very important. When I was a teenager, you wouldn't go to a bar and find lots of televisions everywhere. People were talking. Talk was the mental fire you would gather around in the evening. It occupied a big part of your existence.

Yeah, I think Michael has had to deal with that label of being Michael Caine for a long time.

I'm just a guy who happens to work in public from time to time. I've built a reputation as an established comic, not as a celebrity - a celebrity is someone who is famous but doesn't do anything.

Some people have told me that I'm grumpy; it's not something that I'm aware of. It's not like I walk around poking children in the eye... not very small ones, anyway.

I get a phone call once every 18 months from some mad person who wants me to do something for less than no money and they give me about a week's notice. That's my film career, most of the time.

I don't know that you're able to measure your aggregate wisdom as you go through life. I can't say that I ever feel that I'm sitting on top of a growing mound of wisdom.

I'm Irish, yeah, but I don't need to get up on a soapbox about it.

I draw hundreds and hundreds of pictures of sort of gnarly looking men, so I don't know what that tells you. People who look like... they're waiting for a sandwich that's never going to come. I don't know what's wrong with me.

As an Irish person, there's a historical fascination with America: America is the default green and promised land for Irish people and Italians; that's what we grow up with.

Home gigs can be hard because it's an odd collision. More than anything, I feel self-conscious when my family are in the audience. I'm doing this job which is not quite acting - part of it is me, part performance. You're presenting a cartoon of yourself to people who know you as a line-drawing.

I don't want to do the same thing over and over again.

Have I had therapy? I went to a yoga class once.

The trend now is to get away from stage bound sitcoms.

I do think it's perfectly natural and human to want to invest belief in something. It's just a facet of who we are. What do I believe in? I believe in the obvious things. The people I'm close to and my work - it's not complicated.

Tequila is not even a drink; it's a way for having the cops around without using a phone.

If I hadn't done this I might have ended up digging the roads.

I've been writing since I was very young, even before I was a teenager. As far as I'm concerned, I am a writer - whether my writing's spoken or written in a blog, paper, book or printed on the side of a submarine.

The terror of failure can make you feel like a failure. So a bunch of people think you're not very good at your thing. How much do you invest in what they say? How much do you care? Failure is not putting yourself on the line.

I'm really not big on nationalism, to be honest with you. I really don't think it gets people anywhere except near a pile of dead bodies. I'm Irish, yeah, but I don't need to get up on a soapbox about it.

I actually very rarely see comedy myself, and although I admire the work of some comics, it does come from all over, so I'll get a charge out of some fiction writers and poets.

I really can't describe what my stand-up is like - people see it and they say it's like that, or it's like this, and that's really up to them, that's fine, but I don't sit around all day analysing it. I just try and enjoy a show and interest myself because if I don't do that then I won't interest anybody else.

Women are like canoes full of soup. At first everyone is suspicious but then everyone wants one.

If you're a comic, you don't have a rehearsal room, you rehearse on stage. My main concern is remembering everything.

We are both drawn to surreal situations so the writing was a joy.

I'm delighted to make as many people feel ashamed as possible. There's probably a site like that for everybody. I've heard Newt Gingrich has his own as well.

There's always a host of voices you're inspired by. I love Don DeLillo, and I love Isaac Bashevis Singer, and I love Beckett, and I love Pinter. He's one of the funniest voices in English literature since Dickens.

America's work ethic is non-stop; it's not even enshrined in law that workers have to get their two weeks holiday money. But Americans work harder than everyone else I can think of.

I did throw a lot of eggs into one basket, as you do in your teenage years - 'I am buying these records, I am wearing this'. I did quite a bit of that. You have to do it, wear your stupid shoes, wear your stupid hair.

Showing off seemed to me to be a highly valuable and necessary activity when I was 20.

It's true that I have spoken about doing a book before, but then everyone you speak to is planning to write a book.

When things are going well, I can't write fast enough to keep up with my mind. Writing walks, speech runs and talk flies. Other times, though, it's like fishing.

You're not going to learn anything if you're not prepared to go flat, so I'm very happy to go flat.

I think that women just have a primeval instinct to make soup, which they will try to foist on anybody who looks like a likely candidate.

I have a very low level of recognition, which is fine by me.

I'm actually about as famous as a fourth division footballer from the 70s.

I'd be hard-pressed to think of anybody who's made me laugh, who's funny, but who's also relentlessly positive.

You try various things when you're growing up. I was an attache in the Foreign Service for a while and then I drove a bulldozer, but neither of those panned out for me so it had to be stand-up.

America is this incredible mosaic of immigrants, so people really want to be anchored in some kind of culture as well as the one they are living in.

I don't really think of myself as an actor.

I'm very drawn to Eastern Europe, so I like a Hungarian writer who wrote in French called Emil Cioran; he was always good for giving me such a stir.

I'm organised in some ways, but not in others.

In the same way, there is some creature gnawing away inside of me, urging me to do things in different ways.

Children are the most honest critics. They will say 'You're funny', but also 'You're pathetic - go away.'

It probably says something really clinically terrible about my character that I need to get up on a stage and go 'Ra ra ra' in front of people.

The characters can't be wittier than people are in real life. They have to be character witty.

I think a lot of the time you just parody yourself.

The measure of a conversation is how much mutual recognition there is in it; how much shared there is in it. If you're talking about what's in your own head, or without thought to what people looking and listening will feel, you might as well be in a room talking to yourself.

You can laugh at somebody because they are innocent, and because they are naive or they are about to walk into a wall, but if somebody's giving you stuff, if somebody's talking, giving you their take on things, what makes you laugh, generally speaking, is going to be somebody who is telling it in an angry way.

Black Books adheres to a more old fashioned, traditional sitcom format, which I think works, because in its own way, it's quite theatrical.

I wouldn't be in a huge hurry to go back to Kansas. It was just bizarre. There's a lot of very, very heavy set people who believe in whatever they were told, because they didn't seem to get out very much or be interested in leaving where they were. They just didn't seem that curious, and I find that a little hard to deal with.

One thing that's coming up a lot is: are you as grumpy as you appear from this Black Books thing.

I have no qualifications to do anything else and there weren't any formal application forms you had to fill in for stand-up, so I thought I'd give that a twist.

When I was young, all the politicians looked like ancient Latin teachers or greengrocers. They were mumbly, stumbly men with their hair blowing in their eyes, walking into trees, opening the wrong door. They had no idea how to present themselves.

You know, people sometimes say to me, 'Do you prefer to do this or that, act or do stand-up or write' but the thing that I enjoy most is the difference between all of them, because you're always learning. I don't go around thinking of myself as a great anything. I'm actually lucky to have the chance to fail at all of them.

People will kill you over time, and how they'll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases, like 'be realistic.'

I was very into New Order, Joy Division, all of that when I was younger. I had a lot of bootlegs that I saved up my pocket money to buy. I had all the obscure early EPs.

I'm not drunk onstage, although I've done that a couple of times when I was younger. It's partly just the way I talk - I talk like somebody in a rocking chair. I'm your 150-year-old grandmother.

I would never really analyse what I do. I leave that to other people - I'm not a critic. I just want to get on with whatever I have in hand, you know? Just try to make the best job of the available material.

I do not walk around imaging myself to be intimidating or smart.

You have to assume that you're talking to the most intelligent, tuned-in audience you could ever get. That's the way you're going to get the best out of people. Whether they know you or not shouldn't matter for comedy. They should get to know you pretty quickly. and they should be having a good time pretty quickly.

I enjoy performing, always, but when you're taping a gig, you've got to blank out this mass apparatus of self-consciousness that's surrounding you, this invitation to drown in self-consciousness. Otherwise you just won't be able to do anything.

A lot of the fiction I read growing up was post-war American, and not all of it centers on Manhattan, but around people of the Mad Men generation, people like John Cheever and, in more modern times, Don DeLillo, who I always mention.

I'm just trying to understand what's around me as much as anyone else is, really. To draw a bead on a moving target.

I don't watch a whole lot of stand up. Mainly I prefer to read writers; they make me laugh the most. Something gets you when you're alone and someone's voice is coming through their work. There's a different quality to it that stays with you a bit more.

Lots of comics try stuff out all year round, which is very sensible - I don't.

I never thought I want to do anything, really, except not go to work properly and turn up at the same place every day and eat sandwiches in the same canteen, if I can possibly help it, as I don't think I'd be very good at it.