Louis C. K. Quotes

You know what, it's not your life, it's life. Life is bigger than you, if you can imagine that. Life isn't something that you possess, it's something that you take part in and witness.

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.'

I like all ladies of all different ages.

One time, I threw a candy wrapper on the street. I was with a friend who said to me, You just littered on the street! Don't you care about the environment? And I thought about it, and I said, You know what? This isn't the environment. This is New York City. New York City is not the environment. New York City is a giant piece of litter. Next to Mexico City, it's the shittiest piece of litter in the world. Just a pussy, runny, smokin', stinkin' piece of litter.

It's just a big excuse to say awful things.

Friends should always tell you the truth. But please don’t.

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

I had five dollars in the bank that I couldn't have for three days until they charged me another 15. Leaving me with -10. What does that mean? I don't even have no money any more. I wish I had nothing. But I don't have it. I don't have that much. I have not ten. Negative ten. I can't afford to buy something that doesn't cost anything. I can only afford to get something that costs you give me ten dollars.

I read something in the paper that really confused me the other day. It said that 80 percent of the people in New York are minorities. Shouldn't you not call them minorities when they get to be 80 percent of the population? That's a very white attitude, don't you think? I mean, you could take a white guy to Africa and he'd be like 'Look at all the minorities around here! I'm the only majority.'

I was driving in Manhattan. There's traffic, nobody's moving... The guy behind me is honking just at me. He kept yelling at me. I decided that I'm gonna argue with this guy, but I'm gonna argue about something else. I'm not having his argument; I'm having mine. So, he's like, 'Go!' And I go, 'Well give me back my jacket!' And he stopped. I was like, 'Yeah, you got my jacket! Give it back! I said you could borrow it, not have it! You're stretching it out, you fat pig! Give it back, now!' He got back in his car, and he locked his doors.

You can figure out how bad a person you are by how soon after September 11th you masturbated, like how long you waited... and for me it was between the two buildings going down... I had to do it, otherwise they'd win.

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 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.

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.

Maybe God is an asshole...of course not, he's not an asshole, he's imaginary.

I learned that money can be a lot of things,It can be something that is hoarded, fought over, protected, stolen and withheld. Or it can be like an energy, fueled by the desire, will, creative interest, need to laugh, of large groups of people. And it can be shuffled and pushed around and pooled together to fuel a common interest, jokes about garbage, penises and parenthood.

What we've done with our modern food supply is absolute insanity. It's not even real any more. You used to be able to give a kid an apple and they would love it. Kids can't even taste apples any more. Apples taste like paper to kids now.

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!

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

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

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."

Stand-up is probably the most solo performance in art.

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

Why can't we have racism that's ignorant but nice? You could have stereotypes that are positive about race. You could say, "Those Chinese people, they can fly!" "You know about the Puerto Ricans? They're made of candy!"

I always tell my kids to cut a sandwich in half right when you get it, and the first thought you should have is somebody else. You only ever need half a burger.

I know what it's like to have a bunch of material that's working that you don't care about. You want to die.

I found out that I'm a pretty bad father. I make a lot of mistakes and I don't know what I'm doing. But my kids love me. Go figure.

Most people are dead. Hitler. Ray Charles. Some other guys. But mostly those two.

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.

I can feel how an audience is reacting when I'm on a stage, but when you are on stage, your perception is distorted. That's something you just have to know. It's like pilots that fly at high Gs and they lose, sometimes, consciousness and hand/eye coordination and they just have to know that that's going to happen. They have to be trained to not try to do too much while they are doing that. So when you are on stage, you have to be aware that you are wrong about how it feels a lot of times.

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.

Bill Gates has 90 billion dollars ... If I had 90 billion dollars, I wouldn't have it for long because I would just dream of all the crazy stuff I could do with it. This guy, 90 billion dollars. He could buy every baseball team and make them all wear dresses and still have 88 billion dollars.

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.

Either I'll never get rich from the show but remain intensely proud of the work and stand behind every second of it, or it catches on and I'll make my money down the road.

It’s been a very old thing for people to gather together and laugh at stuff. The first comedian in America really was Abraham Lincoln. He used to go to a pub near where he lived and stand in front of the fire and he packed the place every night and he would just talk and bust everybody in their guts. He was just a hilarious speaker and that’s what he did.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 do, you know, you run down the list, and it feels very much like a chore.

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

I've always got the road. Stand-up makes you so autonomous and self-sufficient that it really helps with that part of show business.

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.