John Cooper Clarke Quotes

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

I always judge people by appearances; don't you anyway? I think clothes are important; that's where the nudist camp falls down.

A suit where I can fall down drunk in a ditch get up the next morning and go on to a wedding; or more likely a funeral at my time of life. I could go to six a week but no man can live on vol-au-vents alone.

Drugs eh! That's the trouble; they're indiscriminate. The good memories go with the fuckin' shit you're tryin' to block out.

Do not go mental, and with that, goodnight.

I'm a short-term nostalgic; things were great ten minutes ago. If only I could go back there. At my time of life I suffer from déjà vu and amnesia at the same time; I can't remember what happens next.

[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.

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.

My advice to any poet; you have to be idle to write it. A pen, a notebook and idleness, those are the three requisites for the manufacture of poetry.

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

I told my dad, who quizzed me about what kind of purse I might reasonably expect for this performance. I told him it was a benefit, all in a good cause, and that I wasn't the only one working for nothing. 'Nothing?' he replied. 'Anybody will employ you for nothing'.

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.

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).

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.