Chris Rock Media Quotations

I like the tradition of the Oscars. I like that some of the greatest comedians ever have hosted the show.

Comedians tend to find a comfort zone and stay there and do lamer versions of themselves for the rest of their career.

Nobody really wants to be a stand-up, they want to get on TV.

Before I was a comedian, I thought the coolest thing that would happen to me was to be a teenager. Boy, was I wrong.

I think anybody in front of a crowd is a comedian.

Bill Cosby was the first comedian I was exposed to, because he doesn't curse.

A comedian has to live in his head. All this comedy comes from a lonely place. When you're surrounded by an entourage, you're not living in your head.

You just got to be really logical when you're a comedian - to a fault. Like a lawyer's got to believe in the law.

Eddie Murphy is to comedians what Nicki Minaj is to Spanx.

Comedians are the one who have to tell the emperor he has no clothes on.

Being a comedian is a lot like being an athlete. If you're Carl Lewis and you're the fastest, then no matter what you're the fastest.

I never had the confidence to say I was going to be in front of the camera as a comedian until I saw Eddie Murphy years later.

Every comedian has a moment in his life when he realizes he's a little bit different from everyone else. It's like being the only guy in a movie who sees the ghost. The ghost talks to you and you talk to him. Then you turn to your friend and say, Hey. Do you see that ghost? And he says, What ghost?

Though part of me had always wanted to be a comedian, another part of me had always wanted to be Bryant Gumbel or Dan Rather.

I'm a rap comedian the same way Bill Cosby is a jazz comedian, Cosby's laid back. I'm like, bang, bang bang, right into it.

I never wanted to churn it out. Comedians tend to work all the time. They never put it down like musicians who might make an album then take three or four years off to recharge their batteries. Comedians tend to work straight through and they get stale because of that. Even when I didn't have a lot of money I never ever did it unless I had something new to say.

Black comics, they only watch Black comedians. You're a comedian; you're not just a Black comedian. You're a comedian. I try to get that through to everybody.

I've told Michael Jackson jokes. If you got really technical, you could say those are jokes about child molestation. You could, if you got technical. A lot of this is just selective outrage because honestly, the audience are the ones that tell us that something shouldn't be spoken. The audience lets us know. And I've never, in my almost 30 years of being a comedian, seen a comedian continue to tell a joke that the audience doesn't respond to. I've never seen it.

I try to stay with it and I try to stay in contact with comedians and just keep comedians in my life 'cause comedians are their own species. If you get away from them, especially as a comedian, I think it's dangerous.

Standup comedians are attracted to one another because of their faults. So we're all kind of messed up in the same way, and once I was around a group of people that saw the world in a different way, it's like this is where I need to be.

I think every fat comedian owes him 80 bucks that's working today.