Michael Ian Black Quotes

I think in doing stand-up there are no rules and there's no architecture.

In stand-up you can go either way. It's live. Somebody might say something in the crowd, you might respond to it. But in a movie you could be spontaneous too. But you pretty much have to stick to that story or that scene or that script, but in stand-up you can go wherever you want to. It's more freedom.

Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everythingin every possible way. The reason for ensuring that that privileged arena is preserved is not that writers want the absolute freedom to say and do whatever they please. It is that we, all of us, readers and writers and citizens and generals and goodmen, need that little, unimportant-looking room. We do not need to call it sacred, but we do need to remember that it is necessary.

So, what is creative freedom? We can make what we want, how we want. The only constraint is: not for any budget.

It's nice to really have the freedom to write what I want.

Write what you like; there is no other rule.

The beautiful thing about stand-up is you can create and immediately deliver, perform, and get paid for what you do.

Sometimes the best thing you could do is a real bad film... you could improvise all over the place and probably only improve the script.

I just go where the guitar takes me.

A lot of my best stuff is just ad libs on stage, and that's one thing that I've gotten back to at the live show.

Cable had a latitude to move which created less censorship and bestowed upon the artists, the writers and the creators, more liberty to create their shows.

The great liberation of imaginative writing is that you're not held back by the facts.

It's hard to force creativity and humor.

I've been very lucky in the freedom that I've been given. Every artist needs two types of freedom: You need the freedom to - the freedom to come up with an idea or treatment - and then you need the other half of the freedom, and that's freedom from - somebody saying, 'This is great. This is how I want you to do it.'

I always want to go back and do stand-up; I like the freedom.

As actors, we went where we wanted to, and the camera followed us: it was like having another person in the room. There was no formal structure to the process. It was very liberating.

It's obvious that I come down on the side of free speech for anybody's work.

When you're a stand-up comic, you live and die by what you say on stage. There's no director or writer or producer who can tell you what to say and not to say. Once in a while, a club owner will ask a comic to work clean, or not say something, but that's few and far between.

The strength of comedy is I don't have to answer to anybody, but sometimes you want to learn from other people and see your ideas strengthen by other people.

Stand-up was my entree into the entertainment world. I didn't have to act out somebody else's words. I could just stand there with a microphone, and nobody would interrupt me. It's the most narcissistic thing you could probably do.

It's great when improv is encouraged. It's a really fun thing. It depends on who's in the movie and how their process works as well. It takes a director who is open to that because you have a script, but then something funny could happen on set.

I love being an idiot, and acting lets you be an idiot.

Musically, I have little ambition. The only real ambition I have is to make music and do music whenever I feel like it, without any real ambition or planning.

When you're acting, you can try your own ideas and be free.

I absolutely loved improv! I felt very much at home being onstage. It freed me to be all sorts of people other than myself. It was an escape from myself, if you will. I still love that creative freedom of improv and making people laugh.