Steve Coogan credited as playing...
Tony Wilson
- God: It's a pity you didn't sign the Smiths, but you were right about Mick Hucknell. His music's rubbish, and he's a ginger.
- Tony Wilson: The smaller the attendance the bigger the history. There were 12 people at the last supper. Half a dozen at Kitty Hawk. Archimedes was on his own in the bath.
- Ian Curtis: [listening to their recording of "She's Lost Control"] I sound like Bowie.
- Tony Wilson: That's good. You like Bowie.
- Ian Curtis: [annoyed] I hate fuckin' Bowie! In "All The Young Dudes" he sings about how you should die when you're twenty-five. Do you know how old he is? He's thirty, twenty-nine, something. He's a liar.
- Tony Wilson: Look, it doesn't matter. A lot of great artists produce their best work when they're... older. You know, W.B. Yeats...
- Ian Curtis: I've never heard of him, mate.
- Tony Wilson: Yeats is the greatest poet since Dante. If he'd have died when he was twenty-five...
- Ian Curtis: I would have heard of him, Tony!
- [last lines]
- [Tony Wilson has just had a vision of God - who looked exactly like Tony Wilson]
- Tony Wilson: Well, it's written in the Bible, isn't it? 'God made man in His own image'.
- Rob Gretton: Yeah, but not a specific man.
- Tony Wilson: No, but if you'd have spoken to Him, He would have looked like you. But you didn't, I did. And he looked like me.
- Rob Gretton: [smoking a joint] Fucking top gear, man.
- Ian Curtis: [shouting across the bar] Wilson, ya fucking cunt!
- Tony Wilson: That's original.
- [to Rob]
- Tony Wilson: Your drink's coming. Is he a friend of yours?
- Rob Gretton: Yeah, he's our singer.
- Ian Curtis: [crossing the bar to approach Tony] Out of the way, Steve.
- Tony Wilson: Hi, Tony Wilson, pleased to meet you.
- [Ian just glowers at him wordlessly]
- Tony Wilson: ... Is he gonna hit me? You're quite close to me there.
- Ian Curtis: Yeah, I know, I wanna be.
- Tony Wilson: Why?
- Ian Curtis: 'Cos you're a cunt, mate.
- Tony Wilson: I know, I heard you the first time.
- Tony Wilson: And tonight something equally epoch-making is taking place. See? They're applauding the DJ. Not the music, not the musician, not the creator, but the medium. This is it. The birth of rave culture. The beatification of the beat. The dance age. This is the moment when even the white man starts dancing. Welcome to Manchester.
- Yvette: And what do you do?
- Tony Wilson: How do you mean?
- Yvette: You know, your job?
- Tony Wilson: Well, I'm Tony Wilson.
- Tony Wilson: Jazz is the last refuge of the untalented. Jazz musicians enjoy themselves more than anyone listening to them does.
- Tony Wilson: You know, I think that Shaun Ryder is on a par with W.B. Yeats as a poet.
- Yvette: Really?
- Tony Wilson: Absolutely. Totally.
- Yvette: Well, that is amazing, considering everyone else thinks he's a fucking idiot.
- Tony Wilson: Most of all, I love Manchester. The crumbling warehouses, the railway arches, the cheap abundant drugs. That's what did it in the end. Not the money, not the music, not even the guns. That is my heroic flaw: my excess of civic pride.
- [watching Vini Reilly of Durutti Column performing "You've Heard It Before"]
- Ryan Letts: Got to stop him singing, Tony.
- Tony Wilson: It's avant-garde, you wouldn't understand it.
- Ryan Letts: It's very poor. Very poor.
- Tony Wilson: It's provocative.
- Ryan Letts: Provocatively poor. Appallingly poor. They're not calling you the new George Epstein, you know.
- Tony Wilson: [getting annoyed] ... It's Brian Epstein.
- Ryan Letts: George Epstein, Beatles manager.
- Tony Wilson: That's Brian Epstein, you dickhead. It's fucking Brian Epstein.
- Ryan Letts: [overlapping] George Epstein. It's Brian Martin.
- Tony Wilson: It's *George* Martin, you knob.
- Ryan Letts: Brian Martin the producer, George Epstein the, er... manager.
- Alan Erasmus: Tony, tell him to fuck off.
- Lindsay: Come on, let's sit down...
- Tony Wilson: [to Letts] You're just fucking *wrong.*
- Martin Hannett: [swigging from a whisky bottle in the studio] I'm trying to get these shower of cunts that masquerade as a band to play some fucking music, which seems to be the greatest and most difficult thing I've ever had to do in my fucking life!
- Tony Wilson: He's calmed down a lot since I last worked with him.
- Tony Wilson: [First address to camera; after his hang-gliding news report] You're going to see a lot more of that sort of thing in the picture. I don't want to say too much, don't want to spoil it. I'll just say one word: 'Icarus'. If you get it, great. If you don't, that's fine too. But you should probably read more.
- Tony Wilson: It was like being on a fantastic fairground ride, centrifugal forces throwing us wider and wider. But it's all right, because there's this brilliant machine at the center that's going to bring us back down to earth. That was Manchester. That is the Hacienda. Now imagine the machine breaks. For a while, it's even better, because you're really flying. But then, you fall, because nobody beats gravity.
- Tony Wilson: There was one problem with the Hacienda: it never made any money. There were huge crowds and a great atmosphere, but it was all fueled by Ecstasy, not alcohol, and we didn't sell E at the bar. Although we did talk about it. So we were spending money on the building, the staff, the DJs, the sound system, but most of the money went to the drug dealers, and guess what? They didn't give the money to us. They spent it on clothes, or cars, or restaurants, or houses, or girls, or guns. Especially guns.
- Tony Wilson: Energy, energy? Energy is, is, it's nothing more than a lot of new age hokum masquerading as spirituality.
- Tony Wilson: My epitaph will be that I never, literally nor metaphorically, sold out. I protected myself from ever having to have the dilemma of having to sell out, by having nothing to sell out.