Billy Connolly > Quotes

“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?”
― Billy Connolly

“Life is a waste of time, and time is a waste of life. Get wasted all the time, and you'll have the time of your life!”
― Billy Connolly

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

“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!”
― Billy Connolly

“A fart is just your arse applauding.”
― Billy Connolly

“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.”
― Billy Connolly, Billy Connolly's Route 66: The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip

“The desire to be a politician should bar you for life from ever becoming one.”
"Don't vote. It just encourages them....”
― Billy Connolly

“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.”
― Billy Connolly

“I think my securities far outweigh my insecurities. I am not nearly as afraid of myself and my imagination as I used to be.”
― Billy Connolly

“If you give people a chance, they shine.”
― Billy Connolly, Billy Connolly's Route 66: The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip

“Fuck the begrudgers”
― Billy Connolly

“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'.”
― Billy Connolly, Billy Connolly's Route 66: The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip

“Never trust people who've only got one fucking book.”
― Billy Connolly

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

“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.”
― Billy Connolly, Coming Home: My Grand Adventures in a Wee Country

“There are two seasons in Scotland: June and Winter”
― Billy Connolly

“Marriage is a wonderful invention; but then again so is a bicycle repair kit.”
― Billy Connolly

“There is this viewpoint that if you have come from the working class you have come from nothing, whereas the middle and upper classes are something, and I don’t hold with that opinion. I think the working class is something. It is everything. They are the builders of society, and without them the whole house falls down.”
― Billy Connolly, Made in Scotland: My Grand Adventures in a Wee Country

“What horrifies me most about war memorials is that no anti-war sentiments are ever displayed. It's as if war is fun or noble, when actually it's all about shit and snot and blood and guts and soldiers stomachs hanging out and people with their faces blown off. But they never showed that side of it. Perhaps, if they did, there'd be less of it.
I remember seeing a picture of a soldier in Vietnam who was sitting, waiting to die, with his jaw missing. His head now started at the top row of teeth; everything beneath that was gone. They didn't put that on the recruitment posters, did they? But that's what war is to me. And I don't care who we're fighting, I don't hate them enough to do something like that to them.”
― Billy Connolly, Billy Connolly's Route 66: The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip

“What horrifies me most about war memorials is that no anti-war sentiments are ever displayed. It's as if war is fun or noble, when actually it's all about shit and snot and blood and guts and soldiers stomachs hanging out and people with their faces blown off. But they never showed that side of it. Perhaps, if they did, there'd be less of it.”
― Billy Connolly, Billy Connolly's Route 66: The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip

“Oh, I can picture myself rattling along Route 66 on that thing, headphones on, singing along to ZZ Top's 'Sharp Dressed Man' or the opening line from 'Born to be Wild' by Steppenwolf - 'Get your motor running...' The trike brings out that in all of us, which is no bad thing. Forget Viagra, get yourself a trike!”
― Billy Connolly

“All anyone really needs to know about barbed wire is that it can tear the arse out of your trousers, give a cow a good fright, entangle a Yorkshire terrier for life, and is nasty stuff made by greedy men.”
― Billy Connolly

“Wisdom is the contant questioning of where you are. And when you stop wanting to know, you're dea. You're walking, but you're dead.”
― Billy Connelly

“After my knighthood was announced, a woman from the BBC came to Glasgow to interview me. We sat down in a lovely hotel in a nice part of town, and she hit me with her first question: ‘This must mean a lot to you, with you coming from nothing?’ I looked at her, and I laughed. ‘I didnae come from nothing,’ I told her. ‘I come from something.’ I mean, I have never hidden that I come from humble stock. I grew up in the tenements of post-war Glasgow. In fact, I used to specify exactly where, onstage: it was on a kitchen floor, ‘on the linoleum, three floors up’. The early years of my life were spent in grinding poverty … but it wasn’t nothing. It was something – something very important. There is this viewpoint that if you have come from the working class you have come from nothing, whereas the middle and upper classes are something,”
― Billy Connolly, Made in Scotland: My Grand Adventures in a Wee Country

“Blessed are those who yodel - for they shall never be troubled by offers of work.”
― Billy Connolly, Windswept & Interesting: My Autobiography

“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.”
― Billy Connolly, Billy Connolly's Route 66: The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip

“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.”
― Billy Connolly, Coming Home: My Grand Adventures in a Wee Country

“I hope I’ve shown a few disbelievers that they should never discount those they think are different, disorganised or distractible.”
― Billy Connolly, Windswept & Interesting: My Autobiography

“Never trust a man who when left alone with a tea cosey... doesn't try it on.”
― Billy Connolly

“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.”
― Billy Connolly, Billy Connolly Live - The Greatest Hits