Lewis Black Quotes

Some people compose their thoughts in front of a typewriter but I find that I am better at composing my thoughts in front of an audience.

I never sit down and write. I just sorta let things form in my brain.

I leave a lot open so I can fill it in later. If I don't have any ideas right away, I can fill it in later.

I'm trying to escape the shackles of a pen and a pad. I've sat in sessions with Jay-Z where he doesn't write anything down. He'll come up with the most incredible triple entendre, all in his head - it's amazing.

I'm not the kind of comic who would try stuff on Twitter, because I have to work up ideas and I can only do that in front of people.

I don't write anything. It's all done onstage, which is why I always tell younger comics that they just have to go do it. You have to get up, talk, and take a thought or a word and just expound, and you find it in there. I don't sit down and write.

Sometimes I do that quite a lot, go back and forth a lot between ideas. Try things out.

Ninety percent of my material is made on stage, but I feel like you're missing something by abandoning sitting down to write entirely.

I work a lot of things out on stage nowadays rather than writing them in big blocks.

Most times, you walk into a room, and you don't really have a starting point. You have to create the starting point, and normally you'd do that by thinking of a title or a concept for a song, then working back from there.

I know I'm going to be doing standup for the rest of my life.

I think I'd always been interested in performing.

For me, the most important thing is to keep everything moving very fast, so when I have an idea, I can realize it and make it audible as soon as possible.

I definitely enjoyed being in front of an audience, making people laugh, and telling stories, so when I realized I could do all three at the same time, that was it.

There's nothing like the spontaneity of making something work on stage.

That's what's so wonderful about collaborating: your idea can explode and become something else.

I like to create whatever that pops up in my head, bring whatever idea to life.

There was a time in my life when I'd only sing. In my initial years, I didn't ever speak on stage, forget acting. Eventually, my confidence as a performing artiste grew.

I've done comedy on stage, in fact it is one of my strong points.

Nothing, believe me, nothing is more satisfying to me personally than getting a great idea and then beatin' it to death.

You've got to remember that improvisers are writers and actors and directors all simultaneously. That's what's happening in real time because you're writing on your feet, and you are acting out the words and you are directing what the staging is. You're deciding what staging is.

I have a creative mind, so if I listen to the song, I have an idea, I thought of five or six months ago, I'll bring it back into the playing field. I can tweak ideas or make them better. Just come up with something and then we go from there.

You find there's no magic trick, sometimes in the shower, sometimes you're just lying in bed calm, sometimes you're just enjoying life and just have a notepad, it's never far away. Always have a notepad on you, because you never know what's going to happen, take a moment and write it down the minute that comes in your head. Even if you can't deal with it until later, I've had that experience where I was in a wedding party and I'm on stage, I'm like, "I hope I don't forget this, something just occurred to me."

To this day, to this very day, except for television, I've never had a writer. Anything I've ever done on the stage, happened on the stage and I developed it from there. It started doing impressions and jokes - which I did very poorly. To this day I can't tell a joke. That sounds nuts, but it's true. I exaggerate it and it becomes a joke. Everything I've ever done I've done out on the stage and it became a performance over many many years.

If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.