Stewart Lee Quotes

The only way to stay sharp is to do live shows. There is no part-time comedy.

I wanted to make a living, but I really was not interested in money at all. I was interested in being a great comedian.

The ability to workshop in stand-up comedy is incomparable to any art form, in my opinion.

In Manhattan, I often do two or three or more shows a night, so I'm always working on new material.

I'm a stand-up comic. Anything else I do besides that is a plus, but stand-up comedy is what I do, it's what I've been doing and it's what I'm going to keep doing.

After the comedy boom of the '80s, there was a certain formula that comedians had to do and could do in order to be successful touring comedians, and those were mainly observational comedians who had a very strict structure of what made an act, and I think it was very performance oriented.

It takes many years to be a great comedian.

I realize as I get older that stand-up is a huge part of who I am. I think I'll do it for the rest of my life.

People who want to do stand-up from the start - I mean that's an extremely self-centred thing to want, isn't it?

I think I probably would have gone into stand-up.

People who have heard of me have heard of me mostly through presenting and asked, 'Why have you gone into comedy?'

Stand-up comedy is something that you have to strive to do, multiple times a night, every night, to be good.

I did so many open mics. I would write jokes on Twitter constantly, and then slowly, over time, open mics turned into shows. If you can get a joke to work at an open mic, it's a good joke.

I've been doing comedy for 20 years now. I started when I was 13 and I think for the first 10 years I was impersonating other people.

I don't write my standup on paper or anything; but I just organically do it on stage, have an idea, chat it up a little bit. I'm keeping notes. I'm trying to keep up with this world and try to bring out a special every year.

So many of these comics are just frustrated singers or actors - they want to get a gig doing a sitcom. It's paint-by-the-numbers comedy, lame joke-telling. They're drawn to it as a career move.

For me, the way I stay consistent is through stand-up comedy.

I never thought I'd end up doing comedy, but actually, it's been something I've really relished the challenge of and ended up doing quite a bit of.

I don't really like doing big stand-up. Whenever I do theaters, I don't like 'em. I don't think they're right for stand-up. I've seen people in theaters, and it just doesn't work, because you're talking to the guy next to you the whole time.

I've been doing stand-up since '89.

I will always do stand-up, even if my acting career takes off. Stand-up is my life.

But long story short, I didn't start doing stand-up because I wanted to have a TV show or be an actor or even wanted to write sketch comedy. I got into stand-up because I love stand-up.

When I started, there was no comedy community, no comedy industry; there were comedians.

Regardless of what I do, whether I write a book or whether I act or whether I host, I'll always do stand-up comedy because those moments, that's what I crave. If I do something funny, and I hear a crowd laugh in that moment, we're all sharing the exact same experience and the exact same feeling.

I have no qualifications to do anything else and there weren't any formal application forms you had to fill in for stand-up, so I thought I'd give that a twist.