Louis C. K.'s Quotes

I could never sit down and write jokes.

I definitely look at my body and I go: 'Yuck.'

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

I do feel a lot of times like I'm out of my league with my kids in terms of what my responsibility is.

I don't know what it's like to be an actor, where if your show gets canceled, really you're just a bum.

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.

I like all ladies of all different ages.

I like being full, every day, with stuff that I have to do.

I love comedians. They're my community.

I spend enough time onscreen looking hangdog and depressed.

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 think one reason TV has always done well is because there is something comforting where you kind of know what you're going to be taken through.

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.

I was an awkward kid.

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

I'm not a political comedian. That's just not what I do.

I'm not sure why I'm so often disgusting on stage. I don't always know where it comes from.

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.

I've met a lot of people who've lost their jobs and they still have a sense of humor.

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

If I owned a network, I would never let a guy just put people on without telling me who they are.

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

It's kind of awkward to eat alone in a restaurant because everybody's looking at me.

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

Life is full of horrible mistakes.

Oh, I love stand-up.

People don't talk to me on airplanes.

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.

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

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

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.

To me, it's very exhilarating when somebody else does a great thing, and it's not me.

When I am in a hotel, and I turn off the lights and the TV, I just freak out. I turn the TV back on and don't get any sleep.

When you're young as a comic, you don't have a lot of leverage.

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

You can't direct without a good crew.

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

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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?'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The only pitch I have to movie people is the same as this one: Just give me $8 million. I'm not telling you what it's about and I'm not telling you who's in it.

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.'

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

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.

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

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.

Perception is created and twisted so quickly.

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'.

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.

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?

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

My kids are really easy. I often worry that they're too easy to deal with. They're really nice 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.

America's a family. We all yell at each other. It all works out.

I don't think women are better than men, I think men are a lot worse than women.

I would rather be with my kids than anybody else.

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.

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

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

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

I don't have a room full of writers pitching ideas. It's just me out of my head.