Steve Martin Quotes
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I took literally everything I knew how to do on stage with me, which was juggling, magic and banjo and my little comedy routines.
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I hope people find my movies funny and will watch them years from now. And, in terms of writing, I hope that something remains that will not seem old-fashioned, that will still have a vibrancy to it 50 years from now.
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Hollywood must be the only place on earth where you can be fired by a man wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a baseball cap.
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Performing music is a way to do comedy, but without the obligation to do a solid hour, hour and half of a standup. I could intersperse it with music, so it became a really good format for me.
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I knew I wanted to be in comedy but the path of least resistance was doing stand-up in folk music clubs where I could get on stage. I guess you could get up no matter how bad you were and you didn't have to audition. You just got up. Everything else required an audition and if you auditioned for a TV show, you would stand in line with a hundred other people. But at the clubs, it was okay just to get up, so that's why I started in stand-up.
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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.
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...a young man, Jamaican, perhaps, his head circled in a scarf with sunbleached dreadlocks on piled on top, looking like a plate of soft-shell crabs.
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I just gave my cat a bath. Now how do I get all this fur off my tounge?
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I think there are people out there writing original bluegrass songs, but it's hard to get them out on the air.
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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.
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Thankfully, persistence is a great substitute for talent.
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The Matisse seemed to respond to the decreasing light by increasing its own wattage. Every object in the room was drained of color, but the Matisse stood firm in the de-escalating illumination, its beauty turning functionality inside out, making itself a more practical and useful presence than anything else in sight.
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All of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.
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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.
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With a cheery delicacy she divided my obsessions into three categories: acceptable, unacceptable, and hilarious.
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There's no better way to learn something than to learn it in front of an audience. Your terror drives you.
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It's like painting the same blank canvas over and over and over and over and over. Once the concept is known, you don't need to see two. And that was in the back of my head, that I was really done artistically with what I had created or pastiched.
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...it is not the big events that hurt the most but rather the smallest questionable shift in tone at the end of a spoken word that can plow most deeply into the heart.
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When the person beside you is making you alert and keen and the idea of being with anyone else is not imaginable.
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When I first started doing my stand-up act, I played the banjo, did comedy, magic tricks, juggled, read poetry. I stuck it all in. I didn't know you were supposed to just stand up and tell jokes. Essentially, that's what my act became: those five elements - except I dropped the poetry.
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It's not tipping I believe in. It's overtipping.
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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.
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I was not naturally talented. I didn't sing, dance or act, though working around that minor detail made me inventive.
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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.