Steve Martin Quotes
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A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.
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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.
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I believe you should place a woman on a pedestal: high enough so you can look up her dress.
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Somewhere in the world is...The world's worst doctor and he could be yours.
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I believe that sex is one of the most beautiful, natural, wholesome things that money can buy.
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No art comes from the conscious mind.
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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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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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I just believe that the interesting time in a career is pre-success, what shaped things, how did you get to this point.
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Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.
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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 realized that comedians of the day were operating on jokes and punch lines. The moment you say the punch line, the audience either laughs sincerely or they laugh automatically or they don't laugh. The thing that bothered me was that automatic laugh. I said, that's not real laughter.
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introductions are hard to come by when your natural state is shyness
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She was feeling her bohemian oats.
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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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Stand-up life is really hard. At one point, I got so paralyzed I could write five screenplays before I could write three jokes for stand-up. Later, I've finally allowed myself to relax quite a bit, to think I can do it because I've done it in the past. The pressure to come up with the material is the same but the anxiety about whether I can do it is gone.
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A celebrity is any well-known TV or movie star who looks like he spends more than two hours working on his hair.
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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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You can't really conduct your life by one or two phrases.
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I have found that-- just as in real life--imagination sometimes has to stand in for experience.
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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.
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I knew I could only play Cyrano if he were Americanized. I had no intention of writing the script myself. I was afraid of it. You're playing with fire when you tamper with a classic. So I went looking for a writer. But it was such a personal idea, and anyone I would give it to would make it his own. It's hard to ask Neil Simon to write your idea.
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I knew I wanted to be in show business so I took the path of least resistance. I loved comedy. But you never know you are funny until people laugh. It's just what I was interested in. I could make people laugh, I guess, but doing it at school and doing it onstage are very different things.
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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.