Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There’s a need to perfect things in a writers’ room, and that can take a lot of fun out of a show sometimes. It’s a struggle. It depends on your personality. Some people love working with a writing staff. I had a great writing staff on Lucky Louie, but it sometimes felt like Congress or something.
For years, Blockbuster Video has edited movies. Like The Bad Lieutenant, when he's masturbating while the girls in the car are doing the thing. I rented it from Blockbuster and sped to that scene, and it was gone. I called up Blockbuster, and I'm like, "I got an erection, and the scene's not there."
You have to be really tenacious. You have to keep at it. There are many roads to get there. If you can get yourself into Harvard, that's a good way to go, because every Harvard graduating class, the agencies come trolling around and they'll look for you. So if you go to Harvard, you'll get found there.
One time I was at a swimming pool with my kids, a public pool. I had my daughter, my six year old, on my arm like this. She was like clamped on, and she's kicking. ... And then she got off and another random child just clamped on. It's like a rat. "Get off of me." "But I love you." "I don't know you, kid."
Sometimes I just want to tell a story regardless of whether it fits what the show is saying. I’ve been in a lot of writing rooms where somebody says an idea and everyone’s dying, like laughing so they’re delirious. It’s like a black hole in a good way, everything starts to fall into it, you know what I mean.
If you're a cartoon character or most TV characters, sure, you'll fight, because the punches are juicy-sounding and they don't leave marks. But in real life, if somebody punches you in the eye, it doesn't make any noise and your eye is swollen for, like, six months. It's a nightmare to get punched in the eye.
Comedians work great as actors because they're good under pressure. With a lot of actors, you have to make them feel like everything's going really well to get a good performance out of them. But, if you have a comedian on the set, you can tell them, 'Hey, you really are screwing this up,' and then they just get better.
People say there's delays on flights. Delays, really? New York to California in five hours, that used to take 30 years, a bunch of people used to die on the way there, have a baby, you would end up with a whole different group of people by the time you got there. Now you watch a movie and [go to the toilet] and you're home.
There's a woman I see who's not my therapist, but she's like an old friend who's a therapist in profession. She lets me talk to her like a therapist once in a while, and she does a great thing. Whenever I have a big dilemma, like this is a big problem in my life, she always says, 'Wow, you're going to have to figure that out.'
A lot of stand-up specials for cable are meant to glorify the comedian. They put you in a really beautiful theater, and sometimes they even blow a little smoke in there to make it misty and sweet. They make the guy look like he's a big rock star. But comedy's not really glamorous. It doesn't enhance comedy for it to look good.
I just always loved comedy and I really wanted to be good at it. And it was heartbreaking, 'cause I started and I wasn't good at it. I was only 17-years-old, so I had a lot to learn about life in general. But I just kept on trying. I was young enough and stupid enough and I had no other choice. I had nothing else I was good at.
There are people that really live by doing the right thing, but I don't know what that is, I'm really curious about that. I'm really curious about what people think they're doing when they're doing something evil, casually. I think it's really interesting, that we benefit from suffering so much, and we excuse ourselves from it.
Rob McElhenney who runs 'It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.' That show absolutely kills me and I am stunned by the consistency of greatness it has maintained over what is now a record breaking amount of seasons ... How do you do that for so many years? My 14-year-old daughter and I watch it together and we both laugh crazy hard.
I didn't make any kind of grades in high school. My mother was a single mom, putting my three sisters through college, and I was such a bad student that I knew I had no right to take her money. But I loved being in classes and learning. I took in a huge amount of what I learned, but I had a feeling of always being behind and being in trouble.
If I found myself alone on planet Earth, no other humans, I would have sex with a monkey in like two minutes. Two minutes. That's really not long enough to be sure you're alone on the Earth, even. That's like... I walk outside, it's- there's not much traffic. "Oh, my God, it's just me! I'm gonna have sex with a monkey right now. Oh, no-there's a person."
It’s been a very old thing for people to gather together and laugh at stuff. The first comedian in America really was Abraham Lincoln. He used to go to a pub near where he lived and stand in front of the fire and he packed the place every night and he would just talk and bust everybody in their guts. He was just a hilarious speaker and that’s what he did.
My last name is Szekely. Sounds like Saykay. When I was a little kid I had an instructor in camp who called me Shnizneckely. He would make fun of my name and it hurt my feelings because I was a little pussy and I cried. He said, 'Well, how do you say it?' I said, Seekay. So he wrote 'C.K' on my jersey and everything. He made my name 'C.K' and I just stuck with it.
I did a show in New Jersey in the auditorium of a technical high school ... Technical high school, that's where dreams are narrowed down. We tell our children, "You can do anything you want." Their whole lives. "You can do anything!" But this place, we take kids - they're 15, they're young - and we tell them, "You can do eight things. We got it down to eight for you."
To me, there's a huge difference between criticism and reviewing. I really love reading good criticism of television and film. To me, a critic is someone who analyzes a show, describes it, talks about the people in it, puts it in historical context of other shows like it, compares it and stuff, and then talks about the intent of the show and whether it failed or didn't.
I learned that money can be a lot of things,It can be something that is hoarded, fought over, protected, stolen and withheld. Or it can be like an energy, fueled by the desire, will, creative interest, need to laugh, of large groups of people. And it can be shuffled and pushed around and pooled together to fuel a common interest, jokes about garbage, penises and parenthood.
I read something in the paper that really confused me the other day. It said that 80 percent of the people in New York are minorities. Shouldn't you not call them minorities when they get to be 80 percent of the population? That's a very white attitude, don't you think? I mean, you could take a white guy to Africa and he'd be like 'Look at all the minorities around here! I'm the only majority.'
I just don't trust any of it. Every time I read something about how there's been another ridiculous climb of the Dow Jones, there's a part of me that goes, “This can't be good.” None of this is real money. You know what I mean? It's not like there's actually more of anything. It's just ideas. When people are getting richer and richer but they're not actually producing anything, it can't end well.
People come back from flights and tell you a story like it's a horror story. That's how bad they make it sound. They're like, 'It was the worst day of my life. We didn't board for 20 minutes and they made us sit there on the runway for 40 minutes.' Oh really? What happened next? Did you fly in the air, incredibly, like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight you non-contributing zero?'
Someday, one of your friends is gonna get divorced, it's gonna happen, and they're gonna tell you. Don't go, 'ohhhh I'm sorry.' That's a stupid thing to say. First of all you're making 'em feel bad for being really happy, which isn't fair. And second of all: divorce is always good news. I know that sounds weird, but it's true, because no good marriage has ever ended in divorce. It's really that simple.
[about being a father] I don't really remember what it was like before. Whatever I had going on, it was bullshit. It wasn't important. It's kind of a nice thing about being a dad. My identity is really about them now, and what I can do for them, so it sort of takes the pressure off of your own life. What am I going to do, who am I? Who cares, you've got to get your kids to school. So I like it that way.
I had five dollars in the bank that I couldn't have for three days until they charged me another 15. Leaving me with -10. What does that mean? I don't even have no money any more. I wish I had nothing. But I don't have it. I don't have that much. I have not ten. Negative ten. I can't afford to buy something that doesn't cost anything. I can only afford to get something that costs you give me ten dollars.
People are too afraid of uptown. A lot of people will tell you, like, "Don't go to Harlem. You can never go there. 'Cause as soon as you get there, they kill you." That's what people think. As soon as you arrive in Harlem, someone just stabs you in the face right away. That's people's image of Harlem: just everyone standing around waiting for lost white people to kill all day. "Did you see any? I didn't either."
I love being divorced. Every year has been better than the last. By the way, I'm not saying don't get married. If you meet somebody, fall in love and get married. Then get divorced. Because that's the best part. Divorce is forever! It really actually is. Marriage is for how long you can hack it. But divorce just gets stronger like a piece of oak. Nobody ever says 'oh, my divorce is falling apart, it's over, I can't take it.'
I used to like people more, but now I have children and that changes your life in a lot of ways. Like you spend time with people you never would have chosen to spend time with, not in a million years. I spend whole days with people, I'm like, "I never would have hung out with you. I didn't choose you. Our children chose each other based on no criteria by the way. They're the same size. They don't care who they make me hang out with."
Working in TV and navigating success is a tricky thing. It's easier to navigate the hard work of starting out because you just do anything they let you do, but once you get into an orbit, after the thrusters have pushed you into the orbit, now you have to navigate that orbit. There's no choices when you're starting out. You're just like, "Please, let me do anything." But then it turns around and it's like, "We'll let you do anything".
I've had two great years, probably five good years. So I had 20 years of just kind of uncertainty and suffering and ego destruction and poverty. All these things. There's no way I'm ever going to catch up to the misery years. It's impossible... If I don't do anything dumb or I don't get a disease or something, and then I've got to five to eight years I think where it'll really be great and then it will start to degenerate like uranium, you know?
One time, I threw a candy wrapper on the street. I was with a friend who said to me, You just littered on the street! Don't you care about the environment? And I thought about it, and I said, You know what? This isn't the environment. This is New York City. New York City is not the environment. New York City is a giant piece of litter. Next to Mexico City, it's the shittiest piece of litter in the world. Just a pussy, runny, smokin', stinkin' piece of litter.
There's people that say “It's not fair You have all that stuff.” I wasn't born with it. It was a horrible process to get to this. It took me my whole life. If you're new at this- and by “new at it.” I mean 15 years in, or even 20- you're just starting to grow traction. Young musicians believe they should be able to throw a band together and be famous, and anything that's in their way is unfair and evil. What are you, in your 20s, you picked up a guitar? Give it a minute.
I can feel how an audience is reacting when I'm on a stage, but when you are on stage, your perception is distorted. That's something you just have to know. It's like pilots that fly at high Gs and they lose, sometimes, consciousness and hand/eye coordination and they just have to know that that's going to happen. They have to be trained to not try to do too much while they are doing that. So when you are on stage, you have to be aware that you are wrong about how it feels a lot of times.
I was talking to my friend and he said his girlfriend was mad at him. I said, "What happened?" He goes: "Well, I guess I, uh... I guess I said something, and, uh... and then she got her feelings hurt." That's a weird way to phrase it: "She got her feelings hurt. I said something, and then she..." Could you more remove yourself from responsibility? "She got her feelings hurt." It's like saying, "Yeah, I shot this guy in the face, and then I guess he got himself murdered. I don't know what happened. He leaned into it."
Race doesn't mean what it used to in America anymore. It just doesn't. Obama's black, but he's not black the way people used to define that. Is black your experience or the color of your skin? My experience is as a Mexican immigrant, more so than someone like George Lopez. He's from California. But he'll be treated as an immigrant. I am an outsider. My abuelita, my grandmother, didn't speak English. My whole family on my dad's side is in Mexico. I won't ever be called that or treated that way, but it was my experience.
My 13-year-old daughter leaves the house at 7:15 every morning and takes a smelly city bus to school way uptown. It's like 8 degrees out, and it's dark and she's got this morning face and I send her out there to take a bus. Meanwhile, my driver is sitting in a toasty Mercedes that's going to take me to work once both kids are gone. I could send her in the Mercedes and then have it come back to get me, but I can't have my kid doing that. I can't do that to her. Me? I earned that f—ing Mercedes. You better f—ing believe it.
When you're a father in a marriage, you sort of become the mother's assistant, and you sort of get a list from her every day, and you do, you know, you run down the list, and it feels very much like a chore. And a lot of fathers live in kind of an avoidance. They sit on the toilet for several hours a day... Oh, honey, it took me 40 minutes to go to the post office... But once you become a dad without the mom there, you have to take it all on, and you sort of activate male skills that you didn't know you could apply to fatherhood.
I was driving in Manhattan. There's traffic, nobody's moving... The guy behind me is honking just at me. He kept yelling at me. I decided that I'm gonna argue with this guy, but I'm gonna argue about something else. I'm not having his argument; I'm having mine. So, he's like, 'Go!' And I go, 'Well give me back my jacket!' And he stopped. I was like, 'Yeah, you got my jacket! Give it back! I said you could borrow it, not have it! You're stretching it out, you fat pig! Give it back, now!' He got back in his car, and he locked his doors.
The earliest stand-up comedy I was aware of was Bill Cosby. I watched Saturday Night Live as soon as I was aware of it, and Monty Python used to be on PBS at weird hours, so I used to try to watch that. And I loved George Carlin on SNL, that was the first stand-up I ever really remember seeing on TV. And then Steve Martin. I guess I was in fifth or sixth grade when Steve Martin showed up, and he was instantly my idol. And Richard Pryor around the same time too, I sort of became aware of him, though I don't remember the first time I saw him.