Top 292 Quotes & Sayings by Louis C. K. - Page 4

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.

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.

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.

Young people don't even consider that it's a good idea to be out on the fringe, which is where good ideas come from.

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.

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.

There's no way you ask Sean Penn a question and then, you're gonna be HUGE !

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.

I have Twitter so I can tell people what I want them to buy and they give me money.

Stereotypically speaking feminists can't take a joke. ::audience boo:: See?

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.

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

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.

Bill has three goldfish. He buys two more. How many dogs live in London?

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.

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

I can't just sit on my daughter's bed and just say 'n---' all night and then put her to sleep. I just ain't gonna do that... I told the girls that these boys are racists, and they're not nice boys. But I think we can still enjoy the stories about the fishin' and the tradin'.

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.

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. And a lot of fathers live in kind of an avoidance. They sit on the toilet for several hours a day... Oh, honey, it took me 40 minutes to go to the post office... But once you become a dad without the mom there, you have to take it all on, and you sort of activate male skills that you didn't know you could apply to fatherhood.

You know when you see a mother someplace just melting down on her kid? She's like, 'Shut up, I hate you, you're ugly!'... Any parents there are thinking, 'What did that shitty kid do to that poor woman? That poor woman. I wish I could help.'

I'm close to my audience. I think I have more tools in my box than other guys who might try it. Also, I know how to do this stuff. I know how to write and shoot and edit. I'm technically adept and that helped with the website. You need a big skill set.

People are always fighting for attention with things now because there's so much content. Actually, if you don't tell people stuff - you just keep your mouth shut - you don't have to whisper it, you just don't yell. Take the bullhorn off your mouth and it's a secret.

People are too afraid of uptown. A lot of people will tell you, like, "Don't go to Harlem. You can never go there. 'Cause as soon as you get there, they kill you." That's what people think. As soon as you arrive in Harlem, someone just stabs you in the face right away. That's people's image of Harlem: just everyone standing around waiting for lost white people to kill all day. "Did you see any? I didn't either."

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.'

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

My kids and I figured out that there’s a third kind of person, and I don’t know what you call them, but it’s somebody who sees that the glass is always full because it’s half full with water and half full with nothing, so that’s the third kind of person. I don’t know what it is.

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.

The ability to just sit there. That's being a person.

Don't text or twitter during the show. Just live your life. Don't keep telling people what you're doing. Just, because also - also - it lights up your big dumb face.

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.

If I found myself alone on planet Earth, no other humans, I would have sex with a monkey in like two minutes. Two minutes. That's really not long enough to be sure you're alone on the Earth, even. That's like... I walk outside, it's- there's not much traffic. "Oh, my God, it's just me! I'm gonna have sex with a monkey right now. Oh, no-there's a person."

You would never do stand-up without an audience. I mean, no one would even consider it. It's like they're the instrument you're playing.

I don't like waking up. I feel like staying in bed usually, but I can't because I've got two kids standing next to my bed, just eager to live another day.

Everything's amazing right now, and nobody's happy.

In 27 years doing this, I've seen a handful of truly great, masterful standup sets. One was Tig Notaro last night at Largo.

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.

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.

Some people think it's demeaning to victims if you ever say anything out-loud about sexual abuse of children. I don't know if that's true.

Performing comedy, you develop a rhythm of ideas and laughs. I live for it.

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

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!

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.

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.

A lot of stand-up specials for cable are meant to glorify the comedian. They put you in a really beautiful theater, and sometimes they even blow a little smoke in there to make it misty and sweet. They make the guy look like he's a big rock star. But comedy's not really glamorous. It doesn't enhance comedy for it to look good.

If I'm not on tour, I can run down to the comedy club and do a little stand-up. If you're an actor, you can't go - I guess there's forms of it.

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

God is like a shitty girlfriend.

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.

Sorry - Americans only buy things that come from suffering. They just enjoy it more when they know someone's getting hurt.

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.

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.

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 grew up in a generation that had exponential technological advances.

You have to be able to do a bunch of things at once, and not think about things you're not doing while you're doing other things. You have to be disciplined about not trying to do everything, all at the same time. It's hard and fun.

There's people that say “It's not fair You have all that stuff.” I wasn't born with it. It was a horrible process to get to this. It took me my whole life. If you're new at this- and by “new at it.” I mean 15 years in, or even 20- you're just starting to grow traction. Young musicians believe they should be able to throw a band together and be famous, and anything that's in their way is unfair and evil. What are you, in your 20s, you picked up a guitar? Give it a minute.

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."

Working in TV and navigating success is a tricky thing. It's easier to navigate the hard work of starting out because you just do anything they let you do, but once you get into an orbit, after the thrusters have pushed you into the orbit, now you have to navigate that orbit. There's no choices when you're starting out. You're just like, "Please, let me do anything." But then it turns around and it's like, "We'll let you do anything".

If you had a jetpack you'd be like I have the shittiest jetpack. Who's your service provider on your jetpack? Did they make the new one? I hate this thing.

When my kids were younger, I used to avoid them. I used to sit on the toilet 'til my legs fell asleep. You want to know why your father spends so long in the toilet? Because he's not sure he wants to be a father.

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.