Steve Martin Quotes
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You can't make something beautiful by trying to make something beautiful. Something becomes beautiful in the process of trying to be something else.
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I like all kinds of music. I listen to Abigail Washburn, the Punch Brothers, and Marc Johnson, the great clawhammer player. I also listen a lot to Sirius Radio, there's a lot of bluegrass there.
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A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.
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It's funny that some ideas start with a little "What if?" and then suddenly you're spending a million dollars to shoot the scene and hoping that it works.
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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.
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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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People come up to me and say "Steve, what is film editing?" And I say "How should I know? You're the director.
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No art comes from the conscious mind.
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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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Anyone who's ever worked with Meryl Streep always says the same thing: can that woman act! And what's with all the Hitler memorabilia?
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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?
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I did a lot of things when I first started out. In order to be in show business, I juggled, I did magic tricks, cards tricks and I played the banjo.
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The lure in art collecting and its financial rewards, not counting for a moment its aesthetic, cultural and intellectual rewards, is like the trust in paper money: it makes no sense when you really think about it. New artistic images are so vulnerable to opinion that it wouldn't take much more than a whim for a small group of collectors to decide that a contemporary artist was not so wonderful anymore, was so last year.
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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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A kiss may not be the truth, but it is what we wish were true.
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It's not the size of the nose that matters, it's what's inside that counts.
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Being on Twitter is like having a fern.
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In a strange way, I don't have a job, so I have a lot of time on my hands. When I do work, it might be very concentrated, and it might be months where you're not really doing anything except maybe playing the banjo or writing something. You know, there's a lot of time in the day if you're not working 9 to 5.
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I believe Ronald Reagan can make this country what it once was... an Arctic region covered with ice.
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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.
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I'm 48. For a while after 'The Jerk' (movie) I had a feeling of failure. I was a little scared. First people discover you and they love you. You get big and then you fail. And people are glad that you fail. But I've always come back and I've started to trust myself.
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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.
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Thankfully, perseverance is a good substitute for talent.
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I don't watch myself generÂally. I do something, see it once, and then I'll probably never see it again unless it's an accident.