Louis C. K. Quotes

I found doing that kind of comedy without an audience is just... for me, it's almost impossible. You need the audience to do their half of the work.

Stand-up is live, so I'm used to being live for most of my career. It's interesting.

I will always do stand-up, even if my acting career takes off. Stand-up is my life.

When I'm not on T.V. or working on a movie, I'm on the road doing stand-up. That's my roots.

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.

Stand-up comedy is something that you have to strive to do, multiple times a night, every night, to be good.

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.

I liked doing live things, and with the Circus we had a live audience.

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.

If you're doing stand-up, there is no fourth wall; you're engaging an audience.

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

I think a theater show is a pure version of me doing my material. The theater crowd is a bit more polite, there really aren't hecklers, and there are a lot of people there to see me, and they're excited about the jokes and hanging out with me for a show.

When I come out to do my stand-up set, I pretty much get bombarded with lines from movies. You try to play off it a little bit, but that's what people want to see.

I don't really like doing big stand-up. Whenever I do theaters, I don't like 'em. I don't think they're right for stand-up. I've seen people in theaters, and it just doesn't work, because you're talking to the guy next to you the whole time.

I spent 25 years as a stand-up comedian.

When you're a stand-up, you play in front of 600 people, and it's all about timing. I could never do stand-up comedy; it would be way too hard for me.

I do love live performing, but I'm not a stand-up naturally, and I don't like the lifestyle of working just in the evenings at clubs and stuff - not a natural gig-er.

When I do stand-up, I'm basically doing a one-man show.

Stand-up keeps you alive. It is definitely the most specialized field in comedy because you need to stay sharp and well-tuned every night.

Wrestling was like stand-up comedy for me. Every night I had a live audience of 25,000 people to win over. My goal was never to be the loudest or the craziest. It was to be the most entertaining.

Stand-up is like a movie every night. You write it, direct it, produce it, the audience votes, and you go home. There's nothing more satisfying.

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

I can tell you this: Stand-up is not glamorous.

It takes many years to be a great comedian.