Steven Wright Quotes

I try to keep performing as much as possible - I just like to. I used to take huge gaps off between gigs, now I just like to do stand-up gigs as much as I can.

I never knew if I would get my own show, but I knew I loved stand-up.

But I love stand-up, and it's where I came from creatively, so it's something I never want to walk away from.

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.

Being a comedian is an incredible thing, but it can be scary sometimes.

Stand-up is the foundation to my career. It's what I started out doing.

It used to be if you wanted to be a comedian, you used to just do sets. You'd go up three times a night, just get better, and then some people would see you and you'd do 'The Tonight Show,' and then boom, you're a comedian.

It seems like when I first started, people got into comedy because they wanted to be good comedians.

I had some friends that tried it down there, and I went to a couple of open mics, and I just kind of got this... this sick urge to try it instead of just watching it.

After I got my first laugh on stage, I was hooked.

Stand-up is kind of like my home base, and doing stand-up in New York is what I like doing most.

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.

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

If my career path takes me elsewhere, that's great. But comedy is my forte.

It's a really nice way to cut your teeth, doing live shows. It's like going to the gym because you do have to think fast. You are constantly under the threat of people not laughing. Instead of getting hit, people could just not laugh, so you really are trying to mine quickly for the funniest thing you could say in that moment.

If I tried to do comedy for the rest of my career, I would not be very successful.

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

I was lucky enough to find stand-up really early in life. And I'm so grateful that I did, because the second I found it, I was like, 'I know what I want to do'.

As a stand-up comic, you have to do the road.

The thing about stand-up is that you end up meeting your idols.

I've always been funny, but I never considered it as a particular career path until my early 30s, when I realized that hip-hop wasn't going to be the long term.

I haven't been offstage for more than two days since I started doing comedy.

Before I started doing standup, I knew that I had what it takes to develop an act. I went down to clubs with not many people there, and I just worked on it, man. A lot of my friends are comedians, so that part had a lot of encouragement, even though the shows were very caveman-like.

But I just think I was lucky enough to figure out early on that I wanted to do comedy, so that's what I put all my effort into.

Those early days of comedy are when you get addicted to it.