Bill Burr Quotes

As a comedian, you're kind of like a blues musician; you have to live a little bit.

At some point I stopped stand-up because I didn't have something to say on a nightly basis.

Not everyone who wants to make a film is crazy, but almost everyone who is crazy wants to make a film.

It didn't have to be a newfound respect for the craft, I knew that it's notoriously difficult and frightens a lot of people off. I don't think anyone knows quite who to attribute it to, but the dying actor who says: "dying is easy, comedy is hard." I hear it.

You know, I liken it to - when you write a joke for somebody else, it's like you - you know, like the Wile E. Coyote dynamite plunger, where he pushes the plunger down and then you see the fuse go then there's an explosion in the distance? That's like writing a joke for somebody. When you tell the joke, you're in the explosion.

I think comedy is the most difficult thing in the world, I really do.

Before doing stand-up, I thought acting was easy - it's not easy. It's a hard life. It's easy in its own way, you just stand there and talk. But there is a difference between people who can do it well and people who can't.

I never go see live comedy shows because I just sit in the audience thinking, "Here's what I would say. Here's what I would do if I got up there." It drives me crazy.

It's hard to get laughs when you're new.

I try not to see new comics - their acts or their films. Part of that is professional. I don't want to be influenced. But another part is fear and jealousy. I'm afraid to see how good they might be. I don't like that emotion, but it's part of me.

Comedy started out as my hobby and then it became my profession. It's like being on call all the time, like having a built-in beeper. You can't just leave the office and relax because you never know when you'll think of something funny.

I've documented a lot of things myself as a filmmaker. If you want a rockumentary, that's in there.

You'd never be able to convince someone to give you money to do a bilingual story where you're not translating half of it - you'd drive people crazy. But in comics, you can do whatever your heart desires.

We live in a fun time with so many ways to express yourself, you would be crazy to be a comedian and not check them all out.

When someone says to me, do you do stand-up I say absolutely not. I like to think of it as a theatrical performance. With me the show changes maybe five to ten percent every night. Of course, whatever I see in front of me and sometimes I get on a little run about it and it changes the show. And my delivery is such that people who have seen me many times say Gee, I never heard that before. Actually, they have, but I might have changed it around.

As a guy comedian, your special is probably the closest thing to the excitement of a wedding day. It's your first one, and you want it to be perfect, and you want it to mean something. You want it to look good.

I got into comedy because I wanted to get into writing.

I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension

One of the funniest lines in my show was written for me by Alan Bursky. I really want to learn this routine!

I don't feel any pressure to be funny at all. I'm funny because I want to be funny. I could sit here and be serious for an hour and you would go away and make me much funnier than I am.

Are you crazy? I don't want to wear ideas. I don't want to have all these complicated thing.

I always remember writing a page of jokes for a comedian and handing it to him backstage at a club and he read it and then took his cigarette lighter and lit the page on...

I've never written jokes. I mean, I'll write things on a piece of paper and riff on them onstage.

My boyfriend's a musician, and I think when he's on stage is the only time he's not worrying. And so that's the reason he keeps doing it is because it gives him that sort of experience of weightlessness that I only get out of being sort of, deep into writing something or really lost in a moment on set, like it's available to me in these select moments through my work.

I think the best cure is to stop doing the thing that you think you should be doing and go and have a bit of fun in another medium, maybe other crazy things.