Louis C. K. Quotes

Don't be pretentious is my first advice to young writers. This is the big problem - just because you're getting an MFA doesn't mean you have to write for the Academy. Be true to your personality. Don't temper your personality down with words. Don't build defensive fortresses around yourself with words - words are your friends.

I don't wanna be like everybody else, I don't wanna rap like everybody else.

I am not bothered with whether my characters are conventional or not. Because I am not in this for the designer labels and the autographs.

You should be able to do you. That's what differentiates an artist from a singer.

I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.

I really think that if there's any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, it's self-consciousness.

In making a web video series number one, you need to have a script that you think is really funny, and it's true to yourself. I think some people use things as a stepping stone, and they want to please people and show them, "Hey, I can do hip guys in Judd Apatow style," and it's not true to them. If there's something you know about, like motorcycles, do something about motorcycles first. Do something that's really true to yourself and find a voice, and make the script as good as possible.

It's a sort of philosophy you cook up for yourself. You probably write things the same as everybody else, but it's your own personal way of saying things.

I'll probably never produce a masterpiece, but so what? I feel I have a Sound aborning, which is my own, and that Sound if erratic is still my greatest pride, because I would rather write like a dancer shaking my ass to boogaloo inside my head, and perhaps reach only readers who like to use books to shake their asses, than to be or write for the man cloistered in a closet somewhere reading Aeschylus while this stupefying world careens crazily past his waxy windows toward its last raving sooty feedback pirouette.

I think a diversity of expression can only be good, so I think the more that people write about their experience, use their imagination to deal with their experience, you know, I think that's going to be good for not only for those authors but also for people who are interested in trying to understand it.

Write the poem only you can write.

Write what you would love to read. Finish what you begin to write. Your voice is uniquely yours and we are all waiting to hear it.

We didn't think about it but we never wanted to sound like anybody else.

Don't write what you think people want to read. Find your voice and write about what's in your heart.

Do the stuff that only you can do. The urge, starting out, is to copy. And that's not a bad thing. Most of us only find our own voices after we've sounded like a lot of other people. But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can. The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That's the moment you may be starting to get it right.

I wasn't intentionally trying to create my own path or be original, it was just I needed to say certain things and I needed to express myself, and that's how it came out.

Write what makes you laugh not what you think will make someone else laugh.

When you find a song that you love, you just have to do it - why would I try to match it? When I wrote more of the songs in the '90s - 'Nick of Time' and other songs I was surprised I came up with - it was because nobody else was saying what I wanted to say.

The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself. It is also his most difficult task.

It does not matter how badly you paint so long as you don't paint badly like other people.

It is rare that even a jazz musician finds an individual voice.

My style is all to myself.

I certainly want people to like my writing, but I know that if I write with the intention of trying to please people, the writing will not be good because it will not be authentic. So, ironically, I have to be willing to write something strange or unlovable in order to write anything truly good.

When I teach writing, I have a mantra: 'Be a first-rate version of yourself, and not a second-rate version of another writer.'

All artists are now free to express their own personality.