Louis C. K. quotes:

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  • If you're a cartoon character or most TV characters, sure, you'll fight, because the punches are juicy-sounding and they don't leave marks. But in real life, if somebody punches you in the eye, it doesn't make any noise and your eye is swollen for, like, six months. It's a nightmare to get punched in the eye.

  • Cars and cameras are the two things I let myself be materialistic about. I don't care about other stuff.

  • Comedians work great as actors because they're good under pressure. With a lot of actors, you have to make them feel like everything's going really well to get a good performance out of them. But, if you have a comedian on the set, you can tell them, 'Hey, you really are screwing this up,' and then they just get better.

  • Breaking records is not something you expect to be doing. That's like a sports thing, it's not usually a comedy and writing thing.

  • I don't like comedy. I like funny things. I don't like comedy. Like, comedy movies are just, 'Oh Jesus.'

  • Talking is always positive. That's why I talk too much.

  • Being popular with an audience is a very rickety ladder to be on.

  • I get mad like anybody else does, but being able to laugh about getting mad is very healthy, and my kids know that.

  • Gay men have to go through something to own their - who they are. They get beat up. They get ostracized. Whatever they go through, if they survive it, they come out very confident people.

  • It's more fun to experience things when you don't know what's going to happen.

  • Life is full of horrible mistakes.

  • I do actually use a boxing trainer when I train for stand-up.

  • Anytime you see a bit where some stranger does something to me, it's me.

  • I have a crazy amount of different jobs, so the way I manage that is to not do more than one at a time. It's like old computers that had small memory chips, they would do something called swapping, where they would fill the memory with one task, do it and get it out.

  • My ex-wife, she really didn't like the material that I did. And that's something I regret, that I wasn't more careful about making sure that she was O.K. with it. I just sort of didn't ask. So that's how that goes.

  • I've learned from experience that if you work harder at it, and apply more energy and time to it, and more consistency, you get a better result. It comes from the work.

  • When I take my kids out for dinner or lunch, people smile at us.

  • To me, art supplies are always okay to buy.

  • When I was first divorced, I started dating younger women, and it was really exciting. But after a while I was like, 'This is just dumb.'

  • To me the goal of comedy is to just laugh, which is a really high hearted thing, visceral connection and reaction.

  • There's been a lot of simple vilification of right-wing people. It's really easy to say, 'Well, you're Christian, you're anti-this and that, and I hate you.' But to me, it's more interesting to say, 'What is this person like and how do they really think?'

  • It's a positive thing to talk about terrible things and make people laugh about them.

  • A very painful part of being a parent is having really negative feelings about your children when you love them so much.

  • I think you have to try and fail, because failure gets you closer to what you're good at.

  • A lot of the struggle I had with movies is I really loved moments and tones and feelings in a scene, and I loved creating those, but I never really had great stories to string them together.

  • Everything that people say is testable.

  • I don't believe in this idea of, 'That's hate speech, stop it.'

  • For my scale, how I grew up and live my life, I'm making plenty of money.

  • Well, when I was younger, I lied all the time, because once you understand the power of lying, it's really like magic because you transform reality for people.

  • If you're a woman and a guy's ever said anything romantic to you, he just left off the second part that would have made you sick if you could have heard it.

  • I'm enjoying the work while I get it right now.

  • You have to be aware of who you're talking to in an audience.

  • I don't have a brother in real life.

  • I thought about going to NYU film school - that was this ideal to me. But I didn't make any kind of grades in high school.

  • You can't cancel my stand-up tours. It's impossible. There's too many separate bosses. There is no 'bosses.'

  • I love comedians. They're my community.

  • I don't think it makes any sense to try to get anyone to not talk.

  • I've tried to do away with lying in my life in the last few years, but it's hard.

  • People get successful and they start saying, 'Well of course I am! I was chosen! I'm special!' No, you're not.

  • There are people that really live by doing the right thing, but I don't know what that is, I'm really curious about that. I'm really curious about what people think they're doing when they're doing something evil, casually. I think it's really interesting, that we benefit from suffering so much, and we excuse ourselves from it.

  • The thing is, comedy's gone in a weird direction. People are really into ironic comedy and fakeness and cleverness.

  • My show is sort of a short-film anthology, and I'm able to tell little stories that don't necessarily carry a whole episode in terms of narrative. I like the audience not being sure what they're getting. I think it's more fun to watch something when you're discovering it as you go along.

  • Sadness is poetic. You're lucky to live sad moments. When you let yourself be sad, your body has antibodies. It has happiness that comes rushing in to meet the sadness.

  • Television for a child creates such a high bar of stimulus that nothing else competes. A beautiful day is absolute crap to a kid who watches tv.

  • When two kids are being completely berserk, and they're naked and throwing food around, sometimes I just let it go because I can see a future where they're going to be dressed, and they're going to be at school. So I kind of let stuff go sometimes.

  • I wish I could keep a journal. I have a lot of journals with one page half written in. I sometimes will write myself a quick email on my Blackberry when I think of something.

  • I'm bored' is a useless thing to say. You live in a great, big, vast world that you've seen none percent of.

  • You could drive a rental car until you don't want it. Just get out of it while it's moving and just walk away. No, I don't feel like being in that car any longer. Just call Hertz. Hi, your car is drifting into the intersection of 28th and Broadway, if you're interested. It's now your problem.

  • One thing I learned from drinking is that if you ever go Christmas caroling, you should go with a group of people. And also go in mid-December.

  • My kids used to love math. Now it makes them cry. Thanks standardized testing and common core!

  • You can't answer a kid's question. A kid never accepts any answer. A kid never says, 'Oh, thanks. I get it.'... They just keep coming with more questions - why, why, why? - until you don't even know who the fk you are anymore at the end of the conversation. It's an insane deconstruction.

  • Sometimes I just want to tell a story regardless of whether it fits what the show is saying. I've been in a lot of writing rooms where somebody says an idea and everyone's dying, like laughing so they're delirious. It's like a black hole in a good way, everything starts to fall into it, you know what I mean.

  • There's a woman I see who's not my therapist, but she's like an old friend who's a therapist in profession. She lets me talk to her like a therapist once in a while, and she does a great thing. Whenever I have a big dilemma, like this is a big problem in my life, she always says, 'Wow, you're going to have to figure that out.'

  • People don't talk to me on airplanes.

  • I don't care about the weight. You know, I'm lucky; I'm one of those people - I can eat donuts, whatever, and I just get fat.

  • I don't stop eating when I'm full. The meal isn't over when I'm full. It's over when I hate myself.

  • I like pressure. Pressure doesn't make me crack. It's enabling. I eat pressure, and there might be times when I get a bad feeling in my gut that this might be too much, but you feel pressure when you're not doing something, you know?

  • I do have very deep, fond memories of my family in Mexico City, but I also remember feeling funny for not speaking English - I was basically an immigrant. But I picked up the language fast and soon I knew that I wanted to be a writer.

  • I am really tired of looking at my hips. I'm seriously really tired of standing naked in the mirror and staring at my hips for hours and hours while muttering, "You hips. You hips need to get it together."

  • I'm a good citizen. I'm a good father. I recycle and I masturbate.

  • You have to be really tenacious. You have to keep at it. There are many roads to get there. If you can get yourself into Harvard, that's a good way to go, because every Harvard graduating class, the agencies come trolling around and they'll look for you. So if you go to Harvard, you'll get found there.

  • There's a need to perfect things in a writers' room, and that can take a lot of fun out of a show sometimes. It's a struggle. It depends on your personality. Some people love working with a writing staff. I had a great writing staff on Lucky Louie, but it sometimes felt like Congress or something.

  • I've started to kind of hate people, and it's not because I have anything against them. It's just, I enjoy it. It's recreation.

  • It's hard having kids because it's boring... It's just being with them on the floor while they be children. They read Clifford the Big Red Dog to you at a rate of 50 minutes a page, and you have to sit there and be horribly proud and bored at the same time.

  • How do women still go out guys, when you consider that there is no greater threat to women than men? We're the number one threat to women! Globally, and historically one cause of injury and mayhem to women. You know what our number one threat is? Heart disease.

  • To me, there's a huge difference between criticism and reviewing. I really love reading good criticism of television and film. To me, a critic is someone who analyzes a show, describes it, talks about the people in it, puts it in historical context of other shows like it, compares it and stuff, and then talks about the intent of the show and whether it failed or didn't.

  • Human kindness has no reward. You should give to others in every way you see. expect absolutely nothing from anyone. It should be your goal to love every human you encounter. All human suffering that you're aware of and continues without your effort to stop it becomes your crime.

  • My uncles were all funny. My dad wasn't funny, but my uncles were all funny. Now I go back and I like him better than them, they were manipulative funny.

  • You know, the people who do indie film and decide who gets those little budgets? They're mean, man. They're cold and very cool-oriented.

  • The Jackass movies are honestly some of the best movies I've ever seen. I laugh so hard at them. Those guys are geniuses. If they had grown up with a different group of people, they could've been performance artists at Bard College, and people would be writing papers about them.

  • You need to build an ability to just be yourself, and not be doing something,

  • I'd like to name my kid a whole phrase. You know, something like Ladies and Gentlemen. That'll be a cool name for a kid. This is my son, Ladies and Gentlemen! Then, when he gets out of hand, I get to go, Ladies and Gentlemen, please!

  • Fathers have skills that they never use at home. You run a landscaping business and you can't dress and feed a four-year-old? Take it on!

  • We have white people problems in America. You know what that is? That's when your life is amazing, so you just make stuff up to get worried about.

  • Life's too short to be an asshole, as an employer or as an employee.

  • Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Leave the dude alone and he'll figure it out.

  • Very few American parents give a crap about how they raise their kids. They put minimal effort into it. Who told you it's a good idea to buy a developing mind a video game?

  • I wish I could know everything ever, like that would be my wish - that's what I hope heaven is, that they tell you who shot JFK and all that stuff.

  • All talking is good, negative and positive. Stabbing is bad; talking is good.

  • I grew up watching all these crazy movies, European movies and stuff, and I guess that I always laughed at things that were a little more offbeat.

  • Every year white people add 100 years to how long ago slavery was. I've heard educated white people say, 'slavery was 400 years ago.' No it very wasn't. It was 140 years ago...that's two 70-year-old ladies living and dying back to back. That's how recently you could buy a guy.

  • Well, I think likability is an overused word. I don't watch people 'cause I like them; I watch them because they're compelling. Sympathetic is a little different. Likable just thins you out. Working to make a character likable is what kills most TV shows.

  • Some entertainers don't pay attention to what's going on around them.

  • You're a tourist in sexual perversion. I'm a prisoner there.

  • There's a huge amount of work that goes into placating a network in regular television. It's literally 70% or 80% of your workload, is showing them the material, getting their notes and presenting it to them and making sure they weigh in. It's a huge amount of work.

  • Expensive quality work doesn't cost more - it pays.

  • To me, comedies are usually the least funny movies. Movies that are actually a comedy are usually not all that funny. To me Goodfellas and Raging Bull are two of the funniest movies I ever saw.

  • Fuck it... That's really the attitude that keeps a family together, it's not "we love each other", it's just "fuck it, man.

  • Perception is created and twisted so quickly.

  • Here's how my brain works: It's stupidity, followed by self-hatred, and then further analysis.

  • I think I'm past any window where I'm suddenly going to become surprisingly ripped so that people go, 'Oh, my God, what happened to you?'

  • I've had soccer moms come up and tell me they can relate when I say that I want to throw my baby in the trash.

  • For years, Blockbuster Video has edited movies. Like The Bad Lieutenant, when he's masturbating while the girls in the car are doing the thing. I rented it from Blockbuster and sped to that scene, and it was gone. I called up Blockbuster, and I'm like, "I got an erection, and the scene's not there."

  • I've been having a lot of trouble sleeping as we all should. I dunno. You don't live that long. It doesn't matter.

  • You ever go to shop for tuna, and it says "dolphin safe", and you look at it and kind of go, "Yeah, but"-like somehow you think it's not going to be as good? Like, "I want to do the right thing-but it's probably kind of bland without the dolphin."

  • I never viewed money as being 'my money' I always saw it as 'the money.' It's a resource. If it pools up around me then it needs to be flushed back out into the system.

  • Every day starts, my eyes open and I reload the program of misery. I open my eyes, remember who I am, what I'm like, and I just go, 'Ugh'.

  • Feeling unsure and lost is part of your path. Don't avoid it. See what those feelings are showing you and use it.

  • I look around, pretty much 100% of the people driving are texting. And they're killing, everybody's murdering each other with their cars. But people are willing to risk taking a life and ruining their own because they don't want to be alone for a second because it's so hard.

  • The part that's difficult is being single, at 41, after 10 years of marriage and two kids. That's like having a bunch of money in a currency of a country that doesn't exist anymore.

  • If you do something and people think you're stupid, just go for crazy. You get more respect that way because nobody likes stupid people.

  • Comedy isn't polite and it isn't correct and it isn't accurate, even. It's just a mess. So that's the way that I approach it.

  • I was a nerd growing up, and I'm a little antisocial and awkward.

  • It's easier to cancel a show if it's expensive.

  • Some things I think are very conservative, or very liberal. I think when someone falls into one category for everything, I'm very suspicious. It doesn't make sense to me that you'd have the same solution to every issue.

  • When you're a father in a marriage, you sort of become the mother's assistant. And you sort of get a list from her every day and you run down the list and it feels very much like a chore.

  • Sometimes I try to take a nap before shows. That clears my head.

  • Pushing the envelope' sort of implies that you're inside the envelope with everyone else, and you're trying to find the edges on the outsides.

  • There's no real preparing at home for stand-up. You just go and you just do it.

  • A household name is like ketchup. Everybody wants ketchup. Ketchup doesn't hurt anybody.

  • I like all ladies of all different ages.

  • A lot of TV is put together by teams, by writing staffs and several different directors. It's a great, very smart way to make television. It's worked for however long TV's been around.

  • When I got divorced, I thought 'Well, there goes my act.'

  • When I read things like the foundations of capitalism are shattering, I'm like, maybe we need that. Maybe we need some time where we're walking around with a donkey with pots clanging on the sides.

  • Technically, I've learned that having good legs and wind is good for being on stage. You have to be in shape and have endurance.

  • I'm not motivated to entertain people through Twitter, so just by having Twitter and not saying anything, I make people mad.

  • I could never sit down and write jokes.

  • I spend enough time onscreen looking hangdog and depressed.

  • Whenever I've encountered a Christian saying, 'Why don't you stop talking like that so I can hear you?' I think, 'Well you're the one putting the earmuffs on, but I wish you could hear me because I like you.'

  • There's two kinds of press that you get when you put out a TV show: The reviews, and the people that just decide what the reviews say.

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