Steve Martin Quotes

In my banjo show with the Steep Canyon Rangers, I do do comedy during that show. It'd be absurd just to stand there mute and play 25 banjo songs.

I'm a bitter, sad, sour young man who makes a career out of hastling people with real careers.

[her] mind blackens. The blackness is not a thought, but if it could be pressed into a thought, if a chemical from a dropper could be dripped onto it causing its color and essence to become visible, it would take the shape of this sentence: Why does no one want me?

When the person beside you is making you alert and keen and the idea of being with anyone else is not imaginable.

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.

What is comedy? Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke.

Mirabelle replaces the absent friends with books and television mysteries of the PBS kind. The books are mostly nineteenth-century novels in which women are poisoned or are doing the poisoning. She does not read these books as a romantic lonely hearts turning pages in the isolation of her room, not at all. She is instead an educated spirit with a sense of irony. She loves the gloom of these period novels, especially as kitsch, but beneath it all she finds that a part of her indentifies with all that darkness.

I cringe at backstory. Because it never quite explains or gets into some psychological thing that is never quite right and never quite the truth and who knows why someone is someway.

I'm enamored with the art world. Anytime you look at anything that's considered artistic, there's a commercial world around it: the ballet, opera, any kind of music. It can't exist without it.

It is the perfect wrong time for Jeremy to do to Mirabelle what she had done to him - call him up for a quick fix - because;, in a sense, she is now betrothed. Her first date with someone who treated her well obligates her to faithfulness, at least until the relationship is explored.

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

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

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

As a school board we felt it's an unfair expense to families. The lawsuit has a certain logic to it - if you have free public education, you can't put these things on top of it. It defeats the purpose.

I could never be a woman, 'cause I'd just stay home and play with my breasts all day.

I think I meant that, given the circumstances of my childhood, I had the illusion that it's easier to be alone. To have your relationships be casual and also to pose as a solitary person, because it was more romantic. You know, I was raised on the idea of the ramblin' man and the loner.

So, while fitting in, she was like a wicked detail standing out against a placid background.

If you've got a dollar and you spend 29 cents on a loaf of bread, you've got 71 cents left; But if you've got seventeen grand and you spend 29 cents on a loaf of bread, you've still got seventeen grand. There's a math lesson for you.

I thought yesterday was the first day of the rest of my life but it turns out today is.

She looked down again and I was stymied. I sat. Oh, this was enough to make me love her, because I was right with her, understanding every second and longing to step in. I didn’t even need to know the specific that was troubling her, because to me her halting voice easily stood for the general woe that hangs in the air, even on life’s happiest days.

Or is it that I think too much?

The environment changed with Martha Stewart and Enron.

I am a wild and crazy guy!

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

All of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.

Unlike Ray Porter, his love is fearless and without reservation.

There are some people that will not pick up a phone and call you, but if you knock on a door and talk to them, they'll talk back to you.

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.

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

So, I can hurt now, or hurt later.

Be undeniably good. When people ask me how do you make it in show business or whatever, what I always tell them & nobody ever takes note of it 'cause it's not the answer they wanted to hear-what they want to hear is here's how you get an agent, here's how you write a script, here's how you do this-but I always say, “Be so good they can't ignore you.” If somebody's thinking, “How can I be really good?” people are going to come to you. It's much easier doing it that way than going to cocktail parties.

Mirabelle is not affected by a man’s failures to approach her, as her own self-depreciating attitude never allows the idea that he would in the first place.

I just gave my cat a bath. Now how do I get all this fur off my tounge?

A joke that works is complete knowledge in a nanosecond.

It's pain that changes our lives.

Always...no wait...never.

introductions are hard to come by when your natural state is shyness

I just respected comedians whether they were or they weren't, from, you know, new or old.

Romance takes place when you first fall in love. It stirs all emotions and you can manipulate and be manipulated.

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.

I just downloaded eleven hundred books onto my Kindle, and now I can’t lift it.

It's horrible for someone to listen to someone learning any instrument - when I was first learning the banjo, I used to have to go out and sit in the car, and even in the summertime I'd have to roll up the windows. Because you just couldn't practice a banjo or a fiddle with other people around. Unless they're being paid.

I just wanted to be in show business. I didn't care if I was going to be an actor or a magician or what. Comedy was a point of the least resistance, really. And on the simplest level, I loved comedy.

It [live performance] is just very difficult. Doing an hour, hour and a half of live standup is an endurance test. You almost have to do it every day to stay up on it.

So she viewed time spent in the land of the normal as an investigation into the world of marriage-worthy men, even if she was unsure about her own interest in marriage. There must be one solid citizen who also had a spark of life, a sense of humor and adventure.

I believe in eight of the ten commandments. I believe in going to church every Sunday... unless there's a game on.

Bad psychoanalysis would say I enjoyed pleasing people, working really hard and pleasing people, which is probably related to my father in some way. But I really liked working hard. When I worked at Disneyland, I'd do 12 hours straight and go home thrilled.

I've always believed that there are funny people everywhere, but they're just not comedians. In fact, some of my best comedic inspirations were not professional entertainers.