Steve Martin Quotes

Always keep a litter bag in your car." -- Steve Martin ~ Dave Conifer

If you saw her in these moments, you might think she was collecting her thoughts in order to go forward. But I see it another way: Her mind is being overwhelmed by two processes that must simultaneously proceed at full steam. One is to deal with and live in the present world. The other is to re-experience and mourn something that happened long ago. It is as though her lightness pulls her toward heaven, but the extra gravity around her keeps her earthbound. ~ Steve Martin

Now let's repeat the non-conformists' oath: I promise to be different! (audience repeats) I promise to be unique! (audience repeats) I promise not to repeat things other people say! (audience repeats, laughs) Good! ~ Steve Martin

I never touched a gun in my life. That and that alone forever doomed me to middle management. ~ Steve Martin

There are few takers for the quiet heart. ~ Steve Martin

I gave my cat a bath the other day ... they love it. He sat there, he enjoyed it, it was fun for me. The fur would stick to my tongue, but other than that ... ~ Steve Martin

I thought 'Borat' was a breakthrough comedy, because it was really funny. It wasn't some studio-produced script with 14 writers. ~ Steve Martin

I actually credit Twitter with fine-tuning some joke-writing skills. I still feel like I'm working at it. ~ Steve Martin

How many people have never raised their hand before? ~ Steve Martin

I first thought maybe I'd do a banjo presentation record, where I'd play a couple of songs and get a bunch of other players to do the rest. Then I realized I had enough of my own songs to do an album of them. ~ Steve Martin

One day I was particularly gloomy, and Jim asked me what the matter was. I told him my high school girlfriend (for all of two weeks) had broken up with me. He said, "Oh, that'll happen a lot." The knowledge that this horrid grief was simply a part of life's routine cheered me up almost instantly. ~ Steve Martin

When you're touring and if you go to a party, there's automatically a celebrity-audience distance. It follows you around, especially when you're on the road in small towns. Any time there is awe, it gets very difficult to be normal, to be yourself. But I'm not saying that that's what made me the way I am. I've probably always been distant. ~ Steve Martin

Writing is something I took up rather than anything I had an inclination toward. I like acting -delivering someone else's message - but writing is more of an accomplishment. ~ Steve Martin

The dictionary is a perfect example of overalphabetization, with its harsh rules and every little word neatly in place. It almost makes me want to go on a diet of grapes and waste away to nothing. ~ Steve Martin

It took me the bulk of my twenties to write one book about a family of alligator wrestlers. Whereas somebody like Steve Martin is releasing his latest banjo symphony, having just completed another movie and acclaimed, best-selling novel. ~ Karen Russell

He had no college dreams and hence no proximity to the challenge of new faces and ideas. ~ Steve Martin

I've got to keep breathing. It'll be my worst business mistake if I don't. ~ Steve Martin

The real joy is in constructing a sentence. But I see myself as an actor first because writing is what you do when you are ready and acting is what you do when someone else is ready. ~ Steve Martin

In a sense, this book is not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know. Yes, these events are true, yet sometimes they seemed to have happened to someone else, and I often felt like a curious onlooker or someone trying to remember a dream. I ignored my stand-up career for twenty-five years, but now, having finished this memoir, I view this time with surprising warmth. One can have, it turns out, an affection for the war years. ~ Steve Martin

I believe in equality. Equality for everybody. No matter how stupid they are or how superior I am to them. ~ Steve Martin

I think probably the most difficult challenge was just the climb and rise in show business because I went through my entire twenties with some success as a comedy writer but not much as a performer. And you have to be kind of informed and naive at the same time. ~ Steve Martin

You know, you're really nobody in L.A. unless you live in a house with a really big door ~ Steve Martin

Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol. ~ Steve Martin

... you're nuts but you're welcome here. ~ Steve Martin

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture. ~ Steve Martin

Any type of humor can be transferred to the screen, as long as there's clarity. The audience wants to know just what they're supposed to be feeling, when they're supposed to laugh. ~ Steve Martin

College totally changed my life. It changed what I believe and what I think about everything. I majored in philosophy. ~ Steve Martin

The banjo is truly an American instrument, and it captures something about our past. ~ Steve Martin

I got a flue shot and now my chimney works perfectly. ~ Steve Martin

The conscious mind is the editor, and the subconscious mind is the writer. ~ Steve Martin

A father carries pictures where his money used to be. ~ Steve Martin

Most comedies are really hard to write, or to watch, because you kind of generally know what's coming. ~ Steve Martin

I've decided to take up smoking, my doctor said I wasn't getting enough tar. ~ Steve Martin

What means the most to me changes through the years. There was a time when movies meant the most. But when I'm concentrating on a project, that's what means the most to me. ~ Steve Martin

It's a mystery to me the way that contemporary art galleries function. ~ Steve Martin

Within you is a stillness and sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself. - Hermann Hesse ~ Steve Martin

The dawn breaks everything, including the mood from the night before. ~ Steve Martin

I see other people crossing the street at the curb and I don't know how they can do it. ~ Steve Martin

Well, today the Grammys is much much better than the Oscars. I think the differences in the shows are that the Grammys are much wilder. The Oscars is much more people in the industry. And people dress wilder, I think, at the Grammys. ~ Steve Martin

I'm tired of wasting letters when punctuation will do, period. ~ Steve Martin

When someone less capable is ahead of me, I am not pleased. It makes me insane. ~ Steve Martin

A luxury item is a thing you have that annoys other people that you have it. ~ Steve Martin

Certainly early on, I kind of modeled myself after Steve Martin and Bill Murray. I would imitate them sometimes. ~ Jeff Garlin

Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do. ~ Steve Martin

Throughout my whole life, as a performer, I've never played with a band. I've always played alone, so I was never required to stay in rhythm or anything. So it was a real different experience for me to start playing with a band. There were so many basic things for me to learn. ~ Steve Martin

The only thing I really recommend, if you're starting out in stand-up is to not try to copy anybody else. You can be influenced by people. I was influenced by Steve Martin and Bob Newhart and Woody Allen, but I never tried to be someone else. I always tried to be myself. And the reason people are successful is they're unique. ~ Ellen DeGeneres

DID STAND-UP COMEDY for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success. ~ Steve Martin

It eventually appeared to be me, cinematically. When I was writing it I was actually an author, you know, writing a book ... But there certainly is a difference in energy between a younger man and an older man. ~ Steve Martin

Be courteous, kind, and forgiving. Be gentle and peaceful each day. Be warm and human and grateful, And have a good thing to say. Be thoughtful and trustful and childlike, Be witty and happy and wise. Be honest and love all your neighbors, Be obsequious, purple, and clairvoyant. Be pompous, obese, and eat cactus. Be dull and boring and omnipresent. Criticize things you don't know about. Be oblong and have your knees removed. Be sure to stop at stop signs, And drive fifty-five miles an hour. Pick up hitchhikers foaming at the mouth, And when you get home get a master's degree in geology. Be tasteless, rude, and offensive. Live in a swamp and be three-dimensional. Put a live chicken in your underwear. Go into a closet and suck eggs. ~ Steve Martin

The auction houses seemed not as dull as their financial counterparts on Wall Street, where parents of daughters imagined glass celings and bottom patting. ~ Steve Martin

I can juggle. I started juggling as a kid. And when I worked at Disneyland, I knew a juggler there named Christopher Faire, and he taught me how to juggle. I used it in my comedy act for a while. ~ Steve Martin

What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation. This type of laugh seemed stronger to me, as they would be laughing at something they chose, rather than being told exactly when to laugh. ~ Steve Martin

She is nearing forty and not so easily forgiven as when her skin bloomed like roses. ~ Steve Martin

One time I was really close to Steve Martin. I was too afraid to actually go talk to him, but I'll count that as meeting. ~ Baron Vaughn

I'm enamored with the art world. ~ Steve Martin

Yeah, well, we're all writers, aren't we? He's a writer that hasn't been published, and I'm a writer who hasn't written anything. ~ Steve Martin

For a while, Mirabelle believes there will be a moment when he will cave in and let himself love her, but eventually she lets the idea go. She hits bottom. She dwells in the muck for several months, not depressed exactly, but involved in a mourning that at first she thinks is for Ray but soon realizes is for the loss of her old self. ~ Steve Martin

I was always a huge fan of E. E. Cummings. He did a series of lectures at Harvard or Princeton, and they were recorded. And they were incredibly moving. ~ Steve Martin

You have to get comfortable [with your work], you really have to know what you're doing, and it has to be almost boring to you to be able to do it well. ~ Steve Martin

You know, a lot of people come to me and they say, "Steve, how can you be so funny?" There's a secret to it, it's no big deal. Before I go out, I put a slice of bologna in each of my shoes. So when I'm on stage, I feel funny. ~ Steve Martin

I've heard lots of people lie to themselves but they never fool anyone. ~ Steve Martin

I had loved magic tricks from the time I was six or seven. I bought books on magic. I did magic acts for my parents and their friends. I was aiming for show business from early days, and magic was the poor man's way of getting in: you buy a trick for $2, and you've got an act. ~ Steve Martin

You can't make something beautiful by trying to make something beautiful. Something becomes beautiful in the process of trying to be something else. ~ Steve Martin

Steve Martin is such an exquisite and precise writer. Everything is so clear; it's like a bell. He says what he means and says it so beautifully. ~ Jason Schwartzman

I think films are about having a good time, so I don't know that there's a message. The message of a film is always what a critic writes, and the fun of a film or the emotion of a film is what the audience feels. ~ Steve Martin

When I was in college, I was debating to try my hand at show business, or to become a professor. I just thought of the risk of not going into show business and always wondering if I would've had a chance. Because that's where my real heart was. ~ Steve Martin

When I finally retire, I just want to go away so no one has to listen to me. ~ Steve Martin

There's a lot of thought in art. People get to talk about important things. There's a lot of sex, you know, in art. There's a lot of naked women and men, and there's intrigue, there's fakery. It's a real microcosm of the larger world. ~ Steve Martin

I'm a huge fan of Steve Martin. He's hilarious, but he has this depth to him and this way of dealing with the difficult things in life with a sense of humor that I think has helped me as an actress. ~ Alexandra Daddario

The greatest thing you can do is surprise yourself. ~ Steve Martin

I have found that
just as in real life
imagination sometimes has to stand in for experience. ~ Steve Martin

There is one thing I would break up over, and that is if she caught me with another woman. I won't stand for that. ~ Steve Martin

I really like the animated film process. It's kind of like doing a play, because you can experiment with it, rewrite it, screen it, go back, then work on it a little bit more. If the joke doesn't work, you can fix it. It's different from a live action movie. ~ Steve Martin

Let's suppose that you want to say, "I am a jerk." IN the 18th century, you would have to go around person to person and utter the phrase individually to each one of them. However, here in the third millennium, with our advances in telephone communication, it is possible to say "I am a jerk" to a thousand people at a time by forgetting to turn off your cell phone and having it ring during a performance of Death of a Salesman. ~ Steve Martin

You know that look that women get when they want to have sex? Me neither. ~ Steve Martin

I'm not interested in stories about movie stars. I couldn't care less what Steve Martin has on his mind. ~ Pete Hamill

I like a woman with a head on her shoulders. I hate necks. ~ Steve Martin

I do think that animated films have the ability to touch you someplace. There is something about live action movies that is different because we know the characters are real people, so they always stay flawed for us somehow. But animated films touch us in a very clear, uncomplicated place. They have that ability. And an animated character can make an expression in a way humans can't do. ~ Steve Martin

I think there are people out there writing original bluegrass songs, but it's hard to get them out on the air. ~ Steve Martin

I thought if I had a Twitter feed and say I had a following of a 100,000, that means 100,000 of them would be interested in my book. It was logical, but it didn't turn out to be true. It turned out if I had a Twitter feed of a 100,000, four of them were interested in my book. ~ Steve Martin

What I mean is that none of my talents had a - what's that great word - rubric. A singer, an actor, a dancer - there was nothing I could really say I was. The writing came much later. And, actually, thank God, because if I had said I'm a singer, I would really have just had one thing to do. ~ Steve Martin

It's so hard to believe in anything anymore. I mean, it's like, religion, you really can't take it seriously, because it seems so mythological, it seems so arbitrary ... but, on the other hand, science is just pure empiricism, and by virtue of its method, it excludes metaphysics. I guess I wouldn't believe in anything anymore if it weren't for my lucky astrology mood watch. ~ Steve Martin

Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke. ~ Steve Martin

Deeply funny musings and adventures elevate Paul Rudnick to the highest level of American comedy writing. ~ Steve Martin

I was not self-destructive, though I almost destroyed myself. In the end, I turned away from stand-up with a tired swivel of my head. ~ Steve Martin

Lord loves a workin' man; don't trust whitey ~ Steve Martin

I used to smoke marijuana. But I'll tell you something: I would only smoke it in the late evening. Oh, occasionally the early evening, but usually the late evening – or the mid-evening. Just the early evening, midevening and late evening. Occasionally, early afternoon, early midafternoon, or perhaps the late-midafternoon. Oh, sometimes the early-mid-late-early morning. . . . But never at dusk. ~ Steve Martin

She has learned that her body is precious and it mustn't be offered carelessly ever again, as it holds a direct connection to her heart. ~ Steve Martin

Some nights, alone, he thinks of her, and some nights, alone, she thinks of him. Some night these thoughts, separated by miles and time zones, occur at the same objective moment, and Ray and Mirabelle are connected without ever knowing it. ~ Steve Martin

There is something going on now in Mexico that I happen to think is cruelty to animals. What I'm talking about, of course, is cat juggling. ~ Steve Martin

I wrote a post about wanting to buy a banjo - a $300 banjo, which is a lot of money, and I don't play instruments; I don't know anything about music. I like music, and I like banjos, and I think I probably heard Steve Martin playing, and I said, 'I could do that.' And I said to my husband, I said, 'Ben, can I buy a banjo?' And he's like, 'No.' ~ Mena Grabowski Trott

Comedy is not pretty. ~ Steve Martin

I've been writing for a long time, since the late '60s. But it hasn't been in the same form. I used to write scripts for television. I wrote for my comedy act. Then I wrote screenplays, and then I started writing New Yorker essays, and then I started writing plays. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the New Yorker essays, but they were comic. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the '90s. In my head, there was a link between everything. One thing led to another. ~ Steve Martin

My problem is that I don't get the same exhiliration from success as I get depression from failure. ~ Steve Martin

Some people have a way with words, and other people ... oh, uh, not have way. ~ Steve Martin

One of the interesting things about Twitter is looking how famous people choose to use it. Take someone like Steve Martin, who I follow: it's all sorts of comic gems, nothing private, nothing personal - all jokes. Other celebrities are overtly personal - like Charlie Sheen. I do a mix of observations and updates. ~ Rob Lowe

I wish I could do a lot of things different. I'm not going to tell you what they are, but if I had a list of all my films right now, I'd go, 'Okay, I'll cross that one out and cross that one out and cross that one out and cross that one out.' Really. But I've made over 40 films. How can I not have some losers in there? ~ Steve Martin

I did stand-up comedy for 18 years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four years were spent in wild success. I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a byproduct. The course was more plodding than heroic. ~ Steve Martin

Mirabelle's ambition is about one-tenth of 1 percent of what would be called normal. ... She is not aware that some people fight like alley cats for desirable situations. She presents a résumé, fills out an application, waits, and finally makes a call to see if she got the job. Usually, a confused secretary will answer and say that the position had been filled weeks ago. This aimlessness in presenting herself contributes to her feeling of being adrift. ~ Steve Martin

When I first started looking at Twitter, I followed people like Steve Martin, who will just write the funniest non sequiturs now and then, which I thought was really fun. That's kind of the road I've taken. Every now and then, something comes into your mind and you put it out there. It's very innocuous. I think it's kind of fun. ~ Steve Carell