Russell Brand > Quotes

“I couldn't possibly have sex with someone with such a slender grasp on grammar!”
― Russell Brand

“It's difficult to believe in yourself because the idea of self is an artificial construction. You are, in fact, part of the glorious oneness of the universe. Everything beautiful in the world is within you. No one really feels self-confident deep down because it's an artificial idea. Really, people aren't that worried about what you're doing or what you're saying, so you can drift around the world relatively anonymously: you must not feel persecuted and examined. Liberate yourself from that idea that people are watching you.”
― Russell Brand

“Even as a junkie I stayed true [to vegetarianism] - 'I shall have heroin, but I shan't have a hamburger.' What a sexy little paradox.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“Have you been out in society recently? 'Cause it's SHIT.”
― Russell Brand

“Rebel children, I urge you, fight the turgid slick of conformity with which they seek to smother your glory.”
― Russell Brand

“For me happiness occurs arbitrarily: a moment of eye contact on a bus, where all at once you fall in love; or a frozen second in a park where it's enough that there are trees in the world.”
― Russell Brand

“Be led by your talent, not by your self-loathing; those other things you just have to manage.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“My dad's philosophy was (and I think still is) that life is a malevolent force, which seeks to destroy you, and you have to struggle with it. Only those who are hard enough will succeed. Most people get crushed, but if you fight, in the end life will go, "Fucking hell. This one's serious. Let him through.”
― Russell Brand

“I hope it is not necessary for me to stress the platonic nature of our relationship- not platonic in the purest sense, there was no philosophical discourse, but we certainly didn't fuck, which is usually what people mean by platonic; which I bet would really piss Plato off, that for all his thinking and chatting his name has become an adjective for describing sexless trysts.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“Life’s never a postcard of life, is it? It never feels like how you’d want it to look.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“To this day, I feel a fierce warmth for women that have the same disregard for the social conventions of sexual protocol as I do. I love it when I meet a woman and her sexuality is dancing across her face, so it's apparent that all we need to do is nod and find a cupboard.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“I like threesomes with two women, not because I'm a cynical sexual predator. Oh no! But because I'm a romantic. I'm looking for "The One." And I'll find her more quickly if I audition two at a time.”
― Russell Brand

“All penguins are the same below the surface, which I think is as perfect an analogy as we're likely to get for the futility of racism.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“I want to change the world, and do something valuable and beautiful. I want people to remember me before I'm dead, and then more afterwards.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“Say I feel all sad and self-indulgent, then get stung by a wasp, my misery feels quite abstract and I long just to be in spiritual pain once more - 'damn you tiny assassin, clad in yellow and black, how I crave my former innocence where melancholy was my only trial'.”
― Russell Brand, Articles Of Faith

“Boggle with sex addicts is up there with go-kart racing with junkies.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“People don't realize that the future is just now, but later.”
― Russell Brand

“From quite early on, I had this idea of compartmentalized identities - 'this is how you are when you are with your mum, and this is how you are when you are with your dad' - so it seemed like I could never absolutely be myself. And the image of myself as compromised and inconsistent made me want to withdraw from the world even further. I had a sense of formulating a paper-mache version of myself to send out in the world, while I sat controlling it remotely from some smug suburban barracks.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“We all need something to help us unwind at the end of the day. You might have a glass of wine, or a joint, or a big delicious blob of heroin to silence your silly brainbox of its witterings but there has to be some form of punctuation, or life just seems utterly relentless.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“Some people were just getting on with their lives, chatting, being young. It simply wouldn't do.”
― Russell Brand

“I've always been a 'your parents have got to come up to the school' type of person. Even now, when I do something wrong - if I say something inappropriate on a live tv show, for example - I half expect to have to deliver a note to Barbara Brand: 'Please come up to Channel 4 head office, Russell's done something despicable.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“The light. The light is so bright that all that remains is you and the darkness. You can feel the audience breathing. It's like holding a gun or standing on a precipice and knowing you must jump. It feels slow and fast. It's like dying and being born and fucking and crying. It's like falling in love and being utterly alone with God; you taste your own mouth and feel your own skin and I knew I was alive and I knew who I was and that that wasn't who I'd been up till then. I'd been so far away but I knew I was home.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“I know that's the sort of thing people say and I really hate it when people say the sort of things people say. I always think, 'You don't mean that, you just think it sounds good.”
― Russell Brand

“My life is just a series of embarrassing incidents strung together by telling people about those embarrassing incidents.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“Of all the consumer products, chewing gum is perhaps the most ridiculous: it literally has no nourishment – you just chew it to give yourself something to do with your stupid idiot Western mouth.

Half the world is starving, and the other’s going, ‘I don’t actually need any nutrition, but it would be good to masticate, just to keep my mind off things.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“There was [really] little difference between someone acting throwing french fries in your face and someone throwing french fries in your face.”
― Russell Brand

“What I've learnt - to my cost - on several occasions in my life, is that people will put up with all manner of bad behaviour so long as you're giving them what they want. They'll laugh and get into it and enjoy the anecdotes and the craziness and the mayhem as long as you're going your job well, but the minute you're not, you're fucked. They'll wipe their hands of you without a second glance.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“The one measure of true love is: you can insult the other. --Slavoj Zizek”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook 2: This Time it's Personal

“I get fixated when I'm bleeding -- I can see why they went in for blood-letting in the medieval times because it makes you feel a bit better. When I cut myself, the drama of it calms me down.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“And while we're on the subject of ducks, which we plainly are, the story, 'The Ugly Duckling' ought be banned as the central character wasn't a duckling or he wouldn't have grown up into a swan. He was a cygnet.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“Over the road there was a church: a modern gray building, which constantly played a recording of church bells. Strange it was. Why no proper bells? I never went in but I bet it was a robot church for androids, where the Bible was in binary and their Jesus had laser eyes and metal claws.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“Surfing should be called "foam-choking" or "sea stabbing.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook 2: This Time it's Personal

“If you strip away self-effacement, charm and the spirit of mischief-qualities that make determination and ambition tolerable- you're left with a right ar**hole.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“Amy [Winehouse] increasingly became defined by her addiction. Our media though is more interested in tragedy than talent, so the ink began to defect from praising her gift to chronicling her downfall. The destructive personal relationships, the blood soaked ballet slippers, the aborted shows, that YouTube madness with the baby mice. In the public perception this ephemeral tittle-tattle replaced her timeless talent. This and her manner in our occasional meetings brought home to me the severity of her condition. Addiction is a serious disease; it will end with jail, mental institutions, or death.”
― Russell Brand

“I've never had a sustained period of medication for mental illness when I've not been on other drugs as well. It's just not something that I particularly feel I need. I know that I have dramatically changing moods, and I know sometimes I feel really depressed, but I think that's just life. I don't think of it as, "Ah, this is mental illness," more as, "Today, life makes me feel very sad." I know I also get unnaturally high levels of energy and quickness of thought, but I'm able to utilize that.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“I think many of the boundaries that convention has placed upon us are arbitrary, so we can fiddle with them if we fancy. Gravity's hard to dispute, and breathing, but a lot of things we instinctively obey are a lot of old tosh.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“What was alien was being ordinary, being humdrum, being trapped into appeasing...having to crush and stifle my opinions, not being allowed to be brilliant, tricking myself into mediocrity.”
― Russell Brand

“... And drinking neat liquor from the bottle, with all my long hair and my shirt undone and my beads, not so much the lizard king, more a gecko duchess, I fitted in nicely with their idea of what a creative person should be.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“The priority of any addict is to anaesthetise the pain of living to ease the passage of day with some purchased relief.”
― Russell Brand

“Tumbling into a dark, Lewis Carroll labyrinth of filth, pursuing a white rabbit of smut!”
― Russell Brand, Scandalous

“A personality for the incredibly beautiful can be a pointless cargo...”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“The most insightful thing I ever heard, was overheard. I was waiting for a rail replacement bus in Hackney Wick. These two old women weren’t even talking to me - not because I’d offended them, I hadn’t, I’d been angelic at that bus stop, except for the eavesdropping. Rail replacement buses take an eternity, because they think they’re doing you a favour by covering for the absent train, you’ve no recourse.
Eventually the bus appeared, on the distant horizon, and one of the women, with the relief and disbelief that often accompanies the arrival of public transport said, ‘Oh look, the bus is coming.’ The other woman - a wise woman, seemingly aware that her words and attitude were potent and poetic enough to form the final sentence in a stranger’s book - paused, then said, ‘The bus was always coming.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“He glanced first at me, and then at his devastated flowerbed; all plowed up and butchered, like a Ripper victim- like Pearly Poll, lying gutted in Hanway Street, Spitalfields.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“By puberty I learned that nothing worth having could be easily attained and to succeed one must be single minded.”
― Russell Brand

“Perhaps if we could popularise through the techniques of branding and consumerism, a different idea, a different narrative, perhaps the world can change. After all it changes constantly and incessantly, it's just the perceptions that we have are governed by people with self-interest and are not inalignment with the health and safety of us as individuals or as a planet.”
― Russell Brand

“Being famous is like a little bit of you is taken away and goes off and lives on its own and does what it wants... I wish it would do more interesting things!”
― Russell Brand

“This is no time for drinking a mug of water - which you would do nowhere else in the world. A mug of water! You just don't drink water from mugs, do ya? Except on the telly. Water out of a mug! Should be a hot drink... mug of water.”
― Russell Brand