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Billy Connolly

Billy Connolly Books

Comedian

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“But I think I want to become part of Scotland when I die. In a coffin, you just turn to dust, so I would prefer to be buried in a wicker casket, or in a sheet like the Africans do, so that I actually become part of the earth. I would like a tree to be planted on top of me. And I told my wife Pamela a long time ago the epitaph that I want on my gravestone: Jesus Christ, is that the time already? Failing that, I would like an epitaph in writing so tiny that visitors would have to inch right next to my gravestone to read it. It would say: You're standing on my balls.”

“inevitably I think sometimes about my death, but those thoughts go away as quickly as they come. I tend not to dwell on them. Somebody asked me if I wanted to join a suicide society. It’s some organisation in Edinburgh that helps people to commit suicide and I believe that a lot of Parkinson’s sufferers choose that course of action. But I don’t want to. I’m too interested in what is going on around me. In any case, the fuckers didn’t even offer me a lifetime membership. I think life and death is a very simple question that is made far too complex by people who have an axe to grind. I think that when you die, you go to where you were before you were born: nowhere.”

“I’ve come in and out of America for… well, I’ve lived here for 15 years. And I’ve played here for nearly 30 years. On and off. But I’ve always played to my fan base. And I can come and do two or three nights in New York or two or three nights in L.A., and all that. But when I go away, nobody knows I’ve been gone. You know, I don’t get reviewed or anything like that. So that’s why I’ve come back and done a longer time in a smaller place, in New York. It’s always the people who live here that get a chance to know me.”

“Well, the film's not only pricking the pomposity of the Church, it's pricking the pomposity, and sometimes you would think fraudulence, of the insurance companies. I had never read anything like this until I was doing the film, but Mark [Joffe, the director] and people showed me stuff where, like a flood, it mattered where the water came from. If you're flooded from above, you get the money; if you're flooded from below, you don't. What's that about?”