“Life is not a theme park and if it is the theme is death.” (from My Booky Wook)
“We all have an essential self, but if you spend every day chopping up meat on a slab, and selling it by the pound, soon you’ll find you’ve become a butcher. And if you don’t want to become a butcher (and why would you?), you’re going to have to cut right through to the bare bones of your own character in the hope of finding out who you really are. Which bloody hurts.” (from My Booky Wook)
“My life is just a series of embarrassing incidents strung together by telling people about those embarrassing incidents.” (from My Booky Wook)
Comedian Russell Brand puts a heckler in his place
“I’m a heterosexual, sir, and one day I’ll show you the statistics and I’ll make you weep.” (in response to a heckler who questioned his sexuality at an early stand-up gig)
“I think, ‘Right, never tell anyone about that. You’ve done a very stupid thing, the less people know about it, the better. If you can inhibit the number of folk that know, less people know how daft you truly are.’ And then the next impulse is: ‘That means it’s funny — tell everyone.’” (on whether anything he does is ever too embarrassing to include in his stand-up comedy, from National Public Radio interview - 4/06/09)
“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.” - (from My Booky Wook)
“[Hosting the VMA awards] was a lot of fun, especially the death threats. If you are going to kill someone, don’t give them advance notice, that gives you a chance to prepare. How can you, while watching the telly, think ‘Oh, I don’t enjoy this. No, I’m not enjoying this at all. Right, I’m going to kill him.’ That’s a huge jump.” (from Russell Brand in New York City)
“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.’” (from My Booky Wook)
“I’ll not be changing, but America will.” (on whether he thinks America will take to him, from TimesOnline interview - 4/20/08)
“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.” (from My Booky Wook)
“Part of me is not really over it. There’s a little part of my brain that’s, ‘Russell, where are the opiates?’ - ‘I’m afraid we can’t have any more opiates.’ - ‘Why?’ - ‘You nearly killed me, didn’t you?’ - ‘That was just a joke!’” (on his recovery from drug addiction, from Russell Brand - Shame - 2006)
