Lewis Black Quotes

I do the same gig. I might change it a little; I might slow it down if I'm in the South. I talk fast, and they're not used to people talking that fast.

- Lewis Black

The whole Valentine's thing is fine, but you don't back it up right next to the biggest gift-giving holiday of the year. Unbelievable. And we find it acceptable.

- Lewis Black

The worst thing about Halloween is, of course, candy corn. It's unbelievable to me. Candy corn is the only candy in the history of America that's never been advertised. And there's a reason. All of the candy corn that was ever made was made in 1911. And so, since nobody eats that stuff, every year there's a ton of it left over.

- Lewis Black

What you don't do, if you're an adult, is decide that you're going to budget things through a sequester. What does that word have to do with budgeting? It's like if you have a family budget and go, 'We really don't know what to take out economically from the budget, so we're going to whack out protein for this week.'

- Lewis Black

It's absolutely stupid that we live without an ozone layer. We have men, we've got rockets, we've got saran wrap - fix it!

- Lewis Black

All food is comfort food. Maybe I just like to chew.

- Lewis Black

Kids seem to get me when I play colleges - they like it because I go after them. They'll come up after and say I am like their dads, only funny.

- Lewis Black

When you're fund-raising for schools, then something's wrong. We seem to have lost some sort of sense of what the common good is, and if you don't have a sense of what the common good is, then at least give to what you think your specific goods are.

- Lewis Black

The fine line that you do when you do political comedy is, as long as you have that laugh, you're fine.

- Lewis Black

Being a playwright is like the equivalent of doing a jigsaw puzzle that has 1,500 pieces, and it's a jigsaw of a blue sky. Not a cloud in sight.

- Lewis Black

It took forever for me to get work because I was a political comic, and now it's become good business, and God knows how long that'll last. You have to do it night after night after night to kind of make it. I still find myself on 'Piers Morgan' or on some show and I think, 'I hope this is funny.'

- Lewis Black

Harry Reid is not funny; he's creepy. Nancy Pelosi is creepy. Charles Schumer is sneaky and creepy.

- Lewis Black

You can never put too much pork in your mouth as far as I'm concerned.

- Lewis Black

Stand-up is the only thing in which you actually write it, act it and direct it simultaneously, so it's actually a great theater exercise.

- Lewis Black

I've got stress like anybody else, and it builds up during the day. Like, I'll be trying to do something on the computer, and I'll get stuck, so I go to the help section. And it just enrages me, because why even call it a help section at all? There's nothing in any way 'helpful' about it.

- Lewis Black

A father and two sons run Adelphia. It's a cable company. And they took from that company a billion dollars. A billion. Three people - three people took a billion dollars. What were they gonna do, start their own space program? 'Let's send the monkey to Mars, Dad!'

- Lewis Black

Usually I'm too tired to apologize.

- Lewis Black

One of the most important things, especially when you're leaving school, is to realize you're going to be dealing with a lot of idiots. And a lot of those idiots are in charge of things, so if you're in an interview and you really want to tell the person off, don't do it.

- Lewis Black

Everybody's always asking me about my blood pressure. They did an interview once where they hooked me up to a blood pressure machine and they'd rile me. I'd yell and scream, and then it would just go back to normal in a few minutes. Everything else is probably rotting, but the blood pressure is spectacular.

- Lewis Black

I like indoor Christmas trees. And I like people who decorate their homes with lights and all that crap. I think it's a healthy outlet for them. If they weren't covering their lawns with twinkling lights, they'd be doing something that was really, really creepy.

- Lewis Black

What I find most disturbing about Valentine's Day is, look, I get that you have to have a holiday of love, but in the height of flu season, it makes no sense.

- Lewis Black

It's a big thing now: A lot of people want to be assistants to celebrities. If you're pursuing that, you're an idiot. You're a moron. The shortest distance between two points is not a celebrity, or being next to a celebrity.

- Lewis Black

I'm a happy person but an angry citizen.

- Lewis Black

My father worked at the Naval Ordnance Lab, and they had a nine-hole course on the property. You paid a quarter.

- Lewis Black

If you're going to pick a book and you want to base a system of government around it, why not 'Harry Potter?'

- Lewis Black

I would like to play Pebble Beach at some point. I keep waiting for them to call and ask me to that little pro-am thing, but I'm not big enough.

- Lewis Black

You look at my audience, and it proves what Congress thinks America is, is wrong. I get people across the political spectrum. Parents and kids come and they're all punked out, and there are these other guys in John Deere caps.

- Lewis Black

This is how sad my life is: I got a scar from scratching my chicken pox too much. That's my big scar story. I really have no major scars.

- Lewis Black

My parents were married for sixty-five years, and I was married for about ten minutes, my first year at Yale Drama School. Something, somehow, didn't get passed on to my generation.

- Lewis Black

Nobody in college races home and says, 'I can't wait to see the news! I can't wait to see who CBS is going to hire!'

- Lewis Black

For a while, I thought the great disappointment of my life was that I don't have a family of my own. Then it dawned on me: That's not what I think; that's what married people think.

- Lewis Black

Every time I use an app, part of my brain dies! We'll get to the point where we go to bed and wonder: 'Did I have a thought today?' You'll have to go to your 'Thought' app!

- Lewis Black

In Vegas, you have an audience you can't find anywhere else. It's from all over the country. You play Seattle, everyone's from Seattle. But in Vegas, you have six from Seattle, a bunch from L.A., some local Las Vegans and maybe a farmer from Iowa. In Vegas, you learn the ins and outs of holding a room because of that great spectrum of folks.

- Lewis Black

Basically, I started on stage yelling and I kept yelling, and then I yelled some more, and then I yelled even louder. I'm modulated now.

- Lewis Black

Anybody who likes writing a book is an idiot. Because it's impossible; it's like having a homework assignment every stinking day until it's done. And by the time you get it in, it's done and you're sitting there reading it, and you realize the 12,000 things you didn't do. I mean, writing isn't fun. It's never been fun.

- Lewis Black

I think that many things that go on in an art school have a tendency to undermine confidence, and that shouldn't be part of the ballgame, ever.

- Lewis Black

When people come to my act any time after Thanksgiving, I usually say, You shouldn't be here. You should be shopping. Our economy depends on you! You should be out there buying stuff.'

- Lewis Black

Democrats are like a big tortoise that's on its back and can't get up; you can't make jokes about that.

- Lewis Black

I like college football, but I'm a huge college basketball fan. I could sit and watch every game of March Madness and be happy. That could be a vacation.

- Lewis Black

The thing that makes my generation The Greatest is our ability to hang out. We're spectacular at it. If you take somebody from my generation and sit them on a couch and bring them food and plumbing, they'll sit there and talk to you about anything you want until the day you die.

- Lewis Black

As psychotic as it gets outside, the comic can be more psychotic.

- Lewis Black

Saying that the Palestinian people aren't really a people - that's not a zany thing to say. That's a psychotic thing to say in the midst of all of the politics we live through on a daily basis.

- Lewis Black

What I've found in my career is that 70 to 75 percent of comics are nice and have some sense of social skills, but there are those who end up in comedy because they don't know how to socialize. I don't want to deal with that group.

- Lewis Black

I continue to work on plays, but I've always felt that you could put a note in a bottle and send it offshore, and you'd have as much chance communicating with people.

- Lewis Black

If you're working out in front of a mirror and watching your muscles grow, your ego has reached a point where it is now eating itself. That's why I believe there should be a psychiatrist at every health club, so that when they see you doing this, they will take you away for a little chat.

- Lewis Black

My parents are the last of the middle class. My father worked for the government designing sea mines. My mother was a substitute teacher. Together, they worked really only until they were sixty.

- Lewis Black

When it comes to idiots, America's got more than its fair share. If idiots were energy, it would be a source that would never run out.

- Lewis Black

Basically I wake up in the morning and I think everything's going to be great. I'm really kind of optimistic, and I look forward to a new day. I pick up 'The New York Times,' and I look at the front page and realize that once again I'm wrong. I start to fixate on stuff.

- Lewis Black

I believe that summer is our time, a time for the people, and that no politician should be allowed to speak to us during the summer. They can start talking again after Labor Day.

- Lewis Black

If the people of New Zealand want to be part of our world, I believe they should hop off their islands, and push 'em closer.

- Lewis Black

In my lifetime, we've gone from Eisenhower to George W. Bush. We've gone from John F. Kennedy to Al Gore. If this is evolution, I believe that in twelve years, we'll be voting for plants.

- Lewis Black

I think the only reason you visit an Apple store is because you wonder what life is like on another planet.

- Lewis Black

If I get a week off, I'll go to a hotel that has a golf course. I like to come downstairs and go right onto the course. I'll do that five days in a row.

- Lewis Black

I think that I don't panic as much as the folks on the left or the right do. I don't have that sense of panic.

- Lewis Black

Republicans have nothing but bad ideas and Democrats have no ideas.

- Lewis Black

Socialism appeals to me. It's like imposed Christianity. You've got to share.

- Lewis Black

If you're going to vote for somebody because you think they have a great faith in God, you'd better be sure that God has faith in them.

- Lewis Black

Do you know what 'meteorologist' means in English? It means liar.

- Lewis Black

The people we elect aren't bipartisan. The American public is bipartisan.

- Lewis Black

You realize that for all the shenanigans that go on in the big circus of politics, everybody wakes up and goes to work.

- Lewis Black

Macs are not intuitive. It's intuitive to the person who created it. It's not intuitive to me.

- Lewis Black

You got to be just stupid to not be focused on alternative energy.

- Lewis Black

I've got stuff about airline mergers, which just shows that my stand-up is getting more insane by the minute.

- Lewis Black

I'm constantly in fear of having a stroke.

- Lewis Black

I watch some CNN and a lot of Fox, because it helps me get irritated.

- Lewis Black

The kids say golf taught them this and that. I get it with the military: A guy joins the military because he needs discipline and has to find himself. But don't tell me, 'Golf helps you find yourself.' I've been playing my whole life, and I'm still looking for myself.

- Lewis Black

Most of the longer-term relationships I've known have been gay relationships. They seem to be able to hang out longer.

- Lewis Black

I'm not a great joke writer, which is odd for a comic to say, but I'm not.

- Lewis Black

My problem has always been with authority, and I'm sure if anybody understands that, it's people in uniform.

- Lewis Black

Let me be serious: divorce is a sacred institution between a man and a woman who hate each other. God wanted Adam to pay alimony to Eve, not Steve.

- Lewis Black

If you yell about one woman, you're not a misogynist. If I yell about Michelle Bachman, that doesn't make me a misogynist. If I compare all women to Michelle Bachman, then I'm a misogynist.

- Lewis Black

I am angry that the Democrats don't have the ability to explain to Republicans that we should be able to feed people in this country, and that is not socialism.

- Lewis Black

You don't want another Enron? Here's your law: If a company, can't explain, in one sentence, what it does... it's illegal.

- Lewis Black

I don't need politicians doing a 24-hour prayer with Oral Roberts to get our country back on track.

- Lewis Black

If we're not going to tax the rich anymore, we're going to create class warfare.

- Lewis Black

The core of the American public, their hearts and their minds are in the right place. And that gives me hope.

- Lewis Black

There's no such thing as soy milk. It's soy juice.

- Lewis Black

It's a privilege to pay taxes. Yeah! It's not a political question, folks. We have to pay for stuff.

- Lewis Black

I don't Tweet a lot because I've Tweeted things that I thought were really innocuous about subjects that are inflammatory, and the response is so insane sometimes from people.

- Lewis Black

Stupidity really gets me going, when it's just plain stupid, obvious stupidity.

- Lewis Black

I like coffee because it gives me the illusion that I might be awake.

- Lewis Black

When we anticipate, we're the happiest. Unless you're on antidepressants. The reason you take antidepressants is because you can't anticipate. You think everything's going to be horrible, so it usually is.

- Lewis Black

And I know this happens because I took economics, and I'd explain it to ya, but I flunked that course. Not my fault. They taught it at 8 o'clock in the morning. And there is absolutely nothing you can learn out of one bloodshot eye.

- Lewis Black

I've been very lucky. There are guys I know who are really terrific in this business of stand-up who have not gotten the recognition they deserve. And it's nice, if you've put in the time, to achieve that recognition.

- Lewis Black

No matter what, your parents are going to worry about you. I had a tour bus, and my mother still thought I was broke. Remember: It's your life, not theirs. Just because your parents sent you to college doesn't mean they bought the rest of your life.

- Lewis Black

You're on Facebook, and these people seem to have endless lives. I don't have time to live my life, let alone tell you what I'm doing, or post a photo.

- Lewis Black

I think comics in New York are interested in being comics. And there're comics in L.A. who are touring comics, who are certainly more interested in stand-up, but a lot of L.A. stand-ups are really looking to do something else.

- Lewis Black

My touring has never stopped; from the time I started doing stand-up, I've been on the road.

- Lewis Black

Republicans and Democrats can barely do what they're supposed to do, and they sure can't do math!

- Lewis Black

I'm amazed that anyone is interested in what I have to say.

- Lewis Black

One of the interesting things about comedy is it's tension release, and nothing creates tension faster than anger.

- Lewis Black

What makes it difficult for people trying to follow a dream is that the whole time you feel like you're slamming your head against the wall. So it's nice to make a breakthrough and not kind of lying there with your head bleeding.

- Lewis Black

Everybody's got cable.

- Lewis Black

The fear of health care changing is beyond belief. Like there's a way to make the system worse. Really?

- Lewis Black

I'm a Jew.

- Lewis Black

I love anything that gets me outside of my own head.

- Lewis Black

Political audiences are not fun.

- Lewis Black

I've always really liked theater. It fascinated me. You can create a reality and get people involved in that reality. It takes place in real time.

- Lewis Black

I get an idea about something. I just start thinking about it, and then I get onstage and I talk about it, and then I think about it some more and talk about it some more, and think about it some more and talk about it some more, until it starts to take a shape.

- Lewis Black

Online, there's no time. It's always Christmas.

- Lewis Black

Janeane Garofalo ended up, in a sense, being pushed by the media into becoming a pundit.

- Lewis Black

I think one reason people play golf is it allows them to obsess about something other than the daily crap. It takes your mind off that.

- Lewis Black

People would be a lot better off if they'd enjoy being single.

- Lewis Black

I'm a selfish, little pig of a man.

- Lewis Black

Democrats should be focused on which way we can help the most people in this country, and Republicans should be focused on how to do that in the most fiscally responsible manner possible.

- Lewis Black

I don't understand how anybody's still a Democrat or a Republican. I don't know what they're basing it on.

- Lewis Black

I don't buy the 'at 60 it's great to have kids' thing. I don't buy the line that has been thrown down - 'You can have a kid at any time.' That doesn't mean you should.

- Lewis Black

You've got to be stupid to heckle me - I am very equipped to win.

- Lewis Black

Democrats are dumb and Republicans are stupid, but the difference between dumb and stupid is dumb isn't funny. Dumb is when you say something and the whole room goes, 'What did he say?'

- Lewis Black

I was broke until I was 40. Really broke. I could get by, but I had nothing.

- Lewis Black

The Democrats have responded to the Republicans' lack of dealing with reality by truly not dealing with reality, either.

- Lewis Black

I started playing golf when I was a kid, because across the street from where we lived there was a little nine-hole golf course where my father worked.

- Lewis Black

Self-love is a big part of golf.

- Lewis Black

When a country wants television more than they want clean water, they've lost their grip.

- Lewis Black

All the candy corn that was ever made was made in 1911.

- Lewis Black

One thing I know about the rich, being rich, is that you can take money from me and tomorrow, I'm still going to be rich.

- Lewis Black

I like my friends because they make me feel normal, even though I'm not.

- Lewis Black

There should be a law that you can't shut down the government - that you don't have that power.

- Lewis Black

Everybody's family has different values.

- Lewis Black

Parenting isn't just parenting your own child.

- Lewis Black

I'm not a big birthday guy; I never have been.

- Lewis Black