Robin Williams Quotes on Life, Love and Comedy, and Who Said Them

Originally published 2018-09-30.

Robin Williams is one of the most quoted performers on the internet, but many lines shared under his name were not his. Some come from his stand-up, where he really did say them. Others were written by screenwriters for characters he played, and a few have no traceable source at all. Below, the best-known lines are grouped by where they come from, so you can tell the comedian, the character and the meme apart.

That matters because Williams himself was a writer of jokes, not of greeting cards. His real material was fast, loose and often unprintable. The gentle, wise sayings that circulate after his death are often the work of other writers, and those writers deserve the credit.

Who Robin Williams was

Williams was born in Chicago on 21 July 1951. He won a full scholarship to the Juilliard School in New York, where he studied from 1973 to 1976, then began doing stand-up in the San Francisco Bay Area, starting at a small club called the Holy City Zoo before moving on to the Comedy Store in Los Angeles. His improvised, rapid-fire style made him a central figure in the Bay Area comedy boom of the late 1970s.

Fame came with the alien Mork, first in an episode of Happy Days and then in his own ABC sitcom, Mork & Mindy (1978–1982), which drew around 60 million weekly viewers at its peak. Film followed: Popeye (1980), The World According to Garp (1982), Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), Dead Poets Society (1989), Awakenings (1990), The Fisher King (1991), Hook (1991), the voice of the Genie in Aladdin (1992), Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), Jumanji (1995), The Birdcage (1996), Good Will Hunting (1997), One Hour Photo (2002) and Night at the Museum (2006).

He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for playing the therapist Sean Maguire in Good Will Hunting, along with two Primetime Emmys, six Golden Globes and five Grammy Awards, one of them for his 1979 comedy album Reality... What a Concept. Away from the cameras he co-founded Comic Relief USA in 1986 with Whoopi Goldberg and Billy Crystal, and performed for about 90,000 troops on USO tours in 13 countries.

Lines from his own comedy

These are the lines most likely to be genuinely his, because they match the style and themes of his recorded stand-up.

The spark of madness

The most famous, usually shared as "You're only given a little spark of madness. Don't lose it", comes from his 1978 HBO show recorded at the Roxy in Los Angeles. The recorded version runs a little differently, ending with the warning that if you lose the spark, "you're nothing". It was a riff about keeping your wildness alive, not a motivational slogan.

Cocaine, politics and the absurd

Williams talked openly on stage about his heavy cocaine use in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The joke usually quoted as "Cocaine is God's way of telling you you are making too much money" fits that era of his act, and his routines described the drug as something that made him paranoid. He quit after the death of his friend John Belushi in 1982 and the birth of his son Zak. He later relapsed into drinking in 2003 and returned to treatment more than once.

Other one-liners in the same spirit circulate widely, such as the definition of politics as "poli" meaning many and "tics" meaning bloodsucking creatures, a joke that spring is nature's way of throwing a party, and a crack about why a psychic hotline needs a phone number. They sound like him and appear in many quote books, but we could not match them to a specific recording, so treat them as attributed rather than confirmed. The same goes for a long riff about how a woman president would never start wars, which is often shared in a censored form.

Satire and the White House

"People say satire is dead. It's not dead; it's alive and living in the White House" is another line widely credited to him. He did make a lot of jokes about US presidents, from Reagan to George W. Bush, and starred in the political comedy Man of the Year (2006), but we have not found the original performance.

On work, fame and doubt

A second group of quotes comes from interviews, where Williams talked more quietly about his career. Their wording varies between sources, so we summarise them rather than repeat them word for word.

• Feeling like a fraud. He described an early fear that people would discover his success was a fluke and that he had lost, or never had, his creative muse. Many performers recognise this feeling, now often called impostor syndrome.
• The Oscar. He said winning an Academy Award was an honour but did not make the work any easier.
• Phones and fans. In later years he complained that people filming him on their phones without asking, often with the red recording light visible, felt intrusive and made real conversation harder.
• Love later in life. He spoke warmly about love the third time around, after two divorces, saying it felt even more precious.
• Local politics. He said politics had become so personal and vicious, even at the local level, that it was hard to see how anything got done.
• No regrets. Looking back at films that flopped, he said he could not regret them, because each one had introduced him to remarkable people.

Lines written for his characters

Some of the most shared "Robin Williams quotes" are film dialogue. He delivered them memorably, but other writers wrote them.

• The worst thing in life. The line about how it is worse to end up with people who make you feel alone than to end up alone comes from World's Greatest Dad (2009), written and directed by Bobcat Goldthwait. The fact-checking site Africa Check traced it to the script, where it is worded slightly differently from the meme. It appears twice in many online lists in two slightly different forms.
• Poetry, beauty, romance, love. John Keating's speech in Dead Poets Society, saying medicine, law, business and engineering sustain life while poetry and love are what we stay alive for, was written by Tom Schulman. His screenplay won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
• Words and ideas can change the world. Keating also tells his students that, whatever anyone tells them, words and ideas can change the world. This line, too, is Schulman's dialogue, and it is often listed twice with small changes.
• Good people in hell. The idea that good people can end up in hell because they cannot forgive themselves is close to dialogue in What Dreams May Come (1998), in which Williams plays a man searching the afterlife for his wife. The film was adapted from a novel by Richard Matheson.

Sayings with no clear source

Several lines on popular Williams lists are older jokes or proverbs that have been attached to him:

• "Never pick a fight with an ugly person" is a gag that circulated in joke collections, and it is credited to several comedians. It also appears twice on many lists.
• "Even fools seem smart when they are quiet" is a version of a much older proverb found in the Bible's Book of Proverbs (17:28).
• The dictionary entry for "redundant" and "Death is nature's way of saying your table is ready" are classic one-liners whose authorship is unclear.
• The graduation gift line plays on Shakespeare's "Some are born great, some achieve greatness" from Twelfth Night, with a twist about privilege. It is attributed to Williams, but we found no original recording.
• The shooting-star passage, which asks readers to wish on a falling star and think of him, spread widely after his death. It reads like a fan tribute, and we found no evidence that he wrote or said it.
• Destiny, optimism and bad times. Lines about believing in destiny, comedy as "acting out optimism" and hard times waking us up to what we ignored are also widely attributed, with no source given.

How to check a quote before sharing it

Famous people collect quotes the way magnets collect iron filings. After a death, especially a shocking one, fans share words that seem to fit the person, and attribution slips. A few habits help:

• Look for the original setting: a named show, album, book, interview or film, with a year.
• Be wary when a line sounds too polished for the person's known style.
• Check whether the words were film dialogue, and credit the screenwriter.
• Search fact-checking sites and Wikiquote, which separates sourced quotes from disputed ones.

None of this takes away from the ideas. A line from Dead Poets Society can move you whoever wrote it. Naming the right author simply gives credit where it belongs, including to writers like Tom Schulman and Bobcat Goldthwait.

Remembering him

Williams died at his home in Paradise Cay, California, on 11 August 2014, aged 63. His death was ruled a suicide. He had recently been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, which he had not made public, and an autopsy later found diffuse Lewy body disease, a brain illness that can cause dementia, anxiety, hallucinations and movement problems. His widow, Susan Schneider Williams, has spoken about how frightening and misunderstood those symptoms were.

If you are struggling, you do not have to deal with it alone. Talk to a doctor or someone you trust. In the United States you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline; in the UK and Ireland, Samaritans answer on 116 123; elsewhere, local emergency services can direct you to support.

What remains of Williams is the work: the stand-up, the films and the energy that made audiences feel he was inventing everything on the spot. The best way to quote him is to quote what he actually said, and to enjoy the rest as the words of the writers who gave him some of his finest scenes.

Sources: Wikipedia: Robin Williams; Wikiquote: Robin Williams; Africa Check: "Worst thing in life" quote written for a 2009 film; D23: Dead Poets Society at 30; original quote list from Love Unconditionally; video by Chicken Soup for the Soul on Facebook.