John Cooper Clarke Quotes

As a card-carrying nosey-parker and professional obsessive, I read up on the subject and learned that Baudelaire was a real pernickety dresser and a bit of a dude; this was my kind of guy. I too would be an Urban Poet.

Marcel was a modern-day Robin Hood; he would rob from the rich because the poor have no money.

Not only do I not have a mobile 'phone, I haven't got a computer. I don't employ any artificial intelligence of any kind. People say to me, "Oh, you should have a computer, they can do this...." I say "Look, I know how fuckin' great they are. That's why, that's the very reason I can't have one." You know I'll just watch a bit of Dion and the Belmonts, then I'll go out...oh, no, what was that Elvis film....oh that reminds me, that Grace Kelly movie...I'll just download this Marx Brothers' clip. You know what I mean, I'd never get out of the fuckin' house. I'd fuckin' die. You'd find me dead with a pizza box with mi arse in the air and mi pants round mi ankles in front of a flickerin' fuckin' computer screen. He never went out when we bought him that computer, he never went out again, he never went through the fuckin' door. The milk stopped being delivered and he fuckin' died.

I was met with the poet’s greatest enemy; indifference.

As is often the case a failed marriage led to a successful divorce. We split the house; I got the outside...... It was at that point where I made a promise to myself, I said I'm not going to get married again, I'm just gonna find a woman I don't like and give her everything.

[on his Dad] He didn't share the general public's dim view of the late Joseph Stalin.

[on the fear of a nervous breakdown] I don't think I ever lost this fear. It turned me into a default existentialist by the time I was six: I quickly learned that the pursuit of happiness is largely pointless, happiness being the only target one merely has to aim at in order to miss.

My paternal grandfather, George, had been a regular soldier in India until chucking-out time in 1948, and funnily enough bore an uncanny resemblance to Mahatma Gandhi (who apparently suffered from corns and bad breath, in other words a supercallousedfragilemysticplaguedwithhalitosis, as Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke almost sang).

Do not go mental, and with that, goodnight.

This guy was going to marmalise me! I mean, where's the kudos in beating up a seven-stone fucking consumptive? I was a self-confessed coward, then as now. My coat of arms has been detailed elsewhere: four white feathers on a field of yellow. Nothing for me is more terrifying than physical pain....

Somebody once said that a wedding is a funeral where you can smell your own flowers. Well, that's a harsh judgement in my book. I prefer to see it as a sexual relationship that is recognised by the police.

I soon got a job as a fire-watcher at the Royal Naval Dockyard, the main employer in Plymouth. If anybody asked how many people worked there, the answer was always the same: about ten per cent.

Everyone thinks they'll make a better judge than any judge don't they? You see these nonces getting off with a six quid fine and being given a house next door to a school. And you think 'I wouldn't have done that'.

At some point, the Mod look had a short-lived Country Life moment, when the gorgeous mohair sheen of the three-button suit gave way to matte autumnal earth tones. Give it a name: fucking brown.

...she took us out on a motor ride to a beach, it was a nudist camp.....What those people do on their time off is their own business, the dirty bastards.