Louis C. K. Quotes

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

The earliest stand-up comedy I was aware of was Bill Cosby. I watched Saturday Night Live as soon as I was aware of it, and Monty Python used to be on PBS at weird hours, so I used to try to watch that. And I loved George Carlin on SNL, that was the first stand-up I ever really remember seeing on TV. And then Steve Martin. I guess I was in fifth or sixth grade when Steve Martin showed up, and he was instantly my idol. And Richard Pryor around the same time too, I sort of became aware of him, though I don't remember the first time I saw him.

I was raised by a hard-working single mother, so my first role model was a woman. My only caretaker was a woman, and I have three sisters, so my community was girls. I have two girls, and my dog is a girl. My dead dog was a girl. I don't know. I guess I've always keyed in on that perspective.

I love comedians. They're my community.

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.

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 can do eight things. We got it down to eight for you.

You can't direct without a good crew.

Everything is amazing and nobody is happy

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.

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.

I know I'm getting old because there will be times when I'm not even doing anything and I'll think, 'I need to go wipe my ass right now.'

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

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.

If the whole country had to have the same conversation that was safe for everybody, it would be a pretty awful place to live. There wouldn't be a conversation.

The only time you should look in your neighbor's bowl is to make sure that they have enough. You don't look in your neighbor's bowl to see if you have as much as them.

Self-love is a good thing but self-awareness is more important. You need to once in a while go ‘Uh, I’m kind of an asshole.’

Out of the people that ever were, almost all of them are dead. There are way more dead people, and you're all gonna die and then you're gonna be dead for way longer than you're alive. Like that's mostly what you're ever gonna be. You're just dead people that didn't die yet.

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

When I was a kid there was a show called 'Holmes & Yo-Yo' about a robot cop. I LOVED that show and I think it only lasted like three episodes.

I don't have sex drive... I have sex 'just sit in the car and hope someone gets in'.

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.

All these words we use, anybody can be a genius now. It used to be you had to have a thought no one ever had before or you had to invent a number. Now, it’s like, “Hey, I’ve got a cup in case we need another cup.” “Dude, you’re a genius!”

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.

If you're older, you're smarter. I just believe that. If you're in an argument with someone older than you, you should listen to 'em ... even if they're wrong, their wrongness is rooted in more information than you have.

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

[about being a father] I don't really remember what it was like before. Whatever I had going on, it was bullshit. It wasn't important. It's kind of a nice thing about being a dad. My identity is really about them now, and what I can do for them, so it sort of takes the pressure off of your own life. What am I going to do, who am I? Who cares, you've got to get your kids to school. So I like it that way.

People come back from flights and tell you a story like it's a horror story. That's how bad they make it sound. They're like, 'It was the worst day of my life. We didn't board for 20 minutes and they made us sit there on the runway for 40 minutes.' Oh really? What happened next? Did you fly in the air, incredibly, like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight you non-contributing zero?'

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.

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

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

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

My last name is Szekely. Sounds like Saykay. When I was a little kid I had an instructor in camp who called me Shnizneckely. He would make fun of my name and it hurt my feelings because I was a little pussy and I cried. He said, 'Well, how do you say it?' I said, Seekay. So he wrote 'C.K' on my jersey and everything. He made my name 'C.K' and I just stuck with it.

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

I'd love to have a shitty job. I couldn't hold any down. Standup was the only thing I could stick with. I'm an idiot that way.

Dating is horrible, it's awful. I don't get it. It's like you're standing there: 'Hi. Do you want to have sex and later wish you hadn't?' It's horrible. And it's awkward at 42 because I don't have the body or the drive. I just sit in the car and hope somebody gets in.

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.

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.

Kids are like buckets of disease that live in your house.

here'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.

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.

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."

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.

Everybody is different. Some comedy is more musical like Steven Wright. His is a pillar of comedy to me. He invented a whole form and all his jokes are poems. So it's different. I wanted to do it like George Carlin. Now I do it like me.

Race doesn't mean what it used to in America anymore. It just doesn't. Obama's black, but he's not black the way people used to define that. Is black your experience or the color of your skin? My experience is as a Mexican immigrant, more so than someone like George Lopez. He's from California. But he'll be treated as an immigrant. I am an outsider. My abuelita, my grandmother, didn't speak English. My whole family on my dad's side is in Mexico. I won't ever be called that or treated that way, but it was my experience.

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.

I killed my Facebook page years ago because time clicking around is just dead time. Your brain isn't resting and it isn't doing. I think people have to get their heads around this thing. All this unmitigated input is hurting folks.

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