Steve Coogan quotes

Steve Coogan is an English actor, comedian, and writer, best known for his character Alan Partridge. His work spans television, film, and stage, earning him critical acclaim and several awards. He has made a significant impact on British comedy and popular culture. Here are 50 of his quotes:

If you start to disrespect the character you're playing, or play it too much for laughs, that can work for a sketch, it will sell some gags, but it's all technique. It's like watching a juggler - you can be impressed by it, but it's not going to touch you in any way.

Steve Coogan

If you chase something too desperately, it eludes you.

Steve Coogan

Even great people are always slightly disappointing, which is generally what makes them interesting.

Steve Coogan

He is the embodiment of Fleet Street bullying, using his newspaper to peddle his Little-England, curtain-twitching Alan Partridgesque view of the world, which manages to combine sanctimonious, pompous moralising and prurient, voyeuristic, judgmental obsession, like a Victorian father masturbating secretly in his bedroom.

Steve Coogan

I think it's always funny when you see kids do Shakespeare.

Steve Coogan

Most of all I don't want to be bored. That's why I'd rather do something that has some sort of ambition, that risks failing, rather than make safer, more comfortable choices.

Steve Coogan

People regurgitate the same old cliches and it becomes like a photocopy of a photocopy of something that's vaguely interesting.

Steve Coogan

Comedy is unique in the sense that laughter is a palpable noise that everyone makes.

Steve Coogan

Me, myself, personally, I like to keep myself private. I have never said I am a paragon of virtue, a model of morality. I simply do what I do.

Steve Coogan

The best feeling in the world is performing in front of a live audience who like what you're doing. I can understand why people become dictators just because of the thrill they get making the speeches.

Steve Coogan

Big comedy is good, I like things that are big, but good comedy has to be truthful I think and has to reflect some sort of reality.

Steve Coogan

The tabloids operate in an amoral parallel universe where the bottom line is selling newspapers.

Steve Coogan

The trick is always to write in pairs because if at least two people find it funny, you've immediately halved the odds of it not being funny.

Steve Coogan

I don't think I'm kind of universally known. I think in the indie world I'm probably better known than in some mainstream Hollywood terms.

Steve Coogan

I don't like new bands. I don't want to be one of those pathetic old men in their forties who knows exactly what 18-year-olds are into.

Steve Coogan

If the person who can effectively sanction ill-conceived wars can play the electric guitar, which is a symbol of rebellion, then that whole worldview becomes confused.

Steve Coogan

What I don't like is dance music or hip hop or any of that sort of thing.

Steve Coogan

When I was a student I was very, very ambitious, completely immersed in my comedy career. I never had that period of reckless hedonism that you should get out of your system in your youth.

Steve Coogan

I'm just attracted to playing people who are ostensible unlikable. That's not to say that there's something in there that makes you care. It might be that you just find them so awful that you just can't stop watching, like a car crash.

Steve Coogan

The great thing is that the funny side of getting old is fuel for my comedy.

Steve Coogan

Yeah, all drama teachers are very effusive, very demonstrative, very emotionally open, very big, and gesticulate a lot, and are very physical.

Steve Coogan

I'm an entertainer. I don't go round saying I'm a paragon of virtue, so that is clearly not in the public interest.

Steve Coogan