Steve Martin Quotes
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I like a woman with a head on her shoulders. I hate necks.
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Dinosaurs did not walk with humans. The evolutionary record says different. They gambled.
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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.
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Why sip from a tea cup, when you can drink from the river.
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I was deeply unhappy, but I didn't know it because I was so happy all the time.
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I got a flue shot and now my chimney works perfectly.
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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.
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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...
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Your only guidepost is your own instinct and judicious editing. In my stand-up act I learned that in the first 10 minutes I could say anything and it would get a laugh. Then I'd better deliver. In the movie it's the same thing. You get a lot of laughs when people first sit down and then the story better kick in. Many years in front of an audience, I would hope, give me a sense of what works.
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I thought 'Borat' was a breakthrough comedy, because it was really funny. It wasn't some studio-produced script with 14 writers.
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I believe in eight of the ten commandments. I believe in going to church every Sunday... unless there's a game on.
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A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.
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Chaos in the midst of chaos isn't funny, but chaos in the midst of order is.
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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.
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The streets of L.A. undulate over short hills as though a finger is poking the landscape from underneath ... laid over this crosshatch are streets meandering on the diagonal creating a multitude of ways to get from one place to another by traveling along the hypotenuse. These are the avenues of the tryst which enable Acting Student A to travel the eighteen miles across town to Acting Student B's garage apartment in nine minutes flat after a hot-blooded phone call at midnight.
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I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper.
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Awards mean nothing to comedians. What matters is the audience, how you're doing - artistically, for the most part - at that moment.
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I would like a wine. The purpose of the wine is to get me drunk. A bad wine will get me as drunk as a good wine. I would like the good wine. And since the result is the same no matter which wine I drink, I'd like to pay the bad wine price.
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As a human being on Earth, you can't imagine friendship not being important in some other solar system or some other planet, or some other context of beings that are conscious. We even see it in animals. It is important for people on Earth to reach out or reach into someone.
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A girl who is willing to give every ounce of herself to someone, who could never betray her lover, who never suspects maliciousness of anyone, and whose sexuality sleeps in her, waiting to be stirred.
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Some people have a way with words, and other people...oh, uh, not have way.
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Hosting the Oscars is much like making love to a woman. It's something I only get to do when Billy Crystal is out of town.
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Talent is the ability to say things well, but genius is the ability to, well, say things.
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People come up to me and say "Steve, what is film editing?" And I say "How should I know? You're the director.