Quotes by John Mahoney

Actually I was born in 1940 in Blackpool because my family lived in Manchester but Manchester was being bombed. So my mother was sent away to Blackpool to have me and then went back; so I lived my first eighteen years in Manchester and then emigrated to the States when I was eighteen.

And then I went to visit my sister in the states and all of a sudden it was just like, it's like... it's like the movie Wizard of Oz when all of a sudden it changes from Black and White to glorious Technicolor.

But it was just like life was waiting for me to make that decision, and when I finally made it, it just took me places I never even believed existed.

He had me arrested one morning at two o'clock in the morning. I was asleep. Banging on my door, and I opened the door and these big, burly Chicago coppers were there, and they said, JOHN MAHONEY, and I said, yes, that's me... . YOU'RE UNDER ARREST and I said, what for and they said FOR IMPERSONATING AN ACTOR.

I was going to be living there and I didn't want to sound like a foreigner all my life.

I'm a dog person, I've had dogs all my life. But you see, it's not really a dog. It's more like a little robot. It's an actor. It displays no emotion whatsoever. I swear that dog doesn't know any of us even though we've done five seasons of Frasier.

It doesn't matter whether you come from Bradford or whether you come from Liverpool or whether you come from London or... . It doesn't matter. All they have to hear is that British accent and they immediately think that you're brilliant beyond belief... . and talented beyond compare.

It was post war. It was very gray, very dreary. Everything was still rationed when I first saw the United States in 1951. I went over to visit my sister who was a war bride.

People say there's no trace of an accent anymore, and there isn't because I worked very hard to lose it. And the reason I did that is a British accent in America is a real status symbol.

So I was the associate editor of a medical journal in Chicago, and I was thirty seven, and all of a sudden I just sort of started going through this dark night of the soul... where I just... . Is this going to be it for me, am I going to be spending the rest of my life writing about cataracts and hemorrhoids... and... . just not what I wanted to do, and I was just intensely depressed all the time.

When I got out of the army I went to college, and I got a Bachelor's degree in English, and then I went to University, and I got a master's degree in English. Because I thought I wanted to teach English. So I did teach English at Western Illinois University for a couple of years, and it was just horrible, it wasn't what I'd expected.

You can take the boy out of England, but you can't take England out of the boy. And ummm, yes, I feel a huge emotional attachment to England.

I took the fear of marriage from my parents' relationship, because I didn't want to end up in a relationship like that, whereas my brothers and sisters learnt a lesson from it and made sure they didn't carry it on into their own marriages.

I didn't want to be the archetypal sponging brother-in-law, so I didn't go into acting when I got to the States. I thought, 'No, I'll go to school and then I'll be an English teacher that'll be fun.' But I was horrible as a teacher. As hard as I tried, I just couldn't inspire those kids to take an interest in Milton and Shakespeare and Donne.