Steve Martin Quotes & Sayings

Always do business as if the person you're doing business with is trying to screw you, because he probably is. And if he's not, you can be pleasantly surprised. — Steve Martin

She was feeling her bohemian oats. — Steve Martin

I've been writing for a long time, since the late '60s. But it hasn't been in the same form. I used to write scripts for television. I wrote for my comedy act. Then I wrote screenplays, and then I started writing New Yorker essays, and then I started writing plays. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the New Yorker essays, but they were comic. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the '90s. In my head, there was a link between everything. One thing led to another. — Steve Martin

I was very interested in vaudeville. It was the only sort of discipline that was a five-minute act on stage, which is what I really enjoyed and saw myself doing. And I bought books on it. — Steve Martin

To Mirabelle, the idea of being an object of obsession is alluring and represents a powerful love. She fails to understand, however, that men become obsessive over beautiful women because they want no one else to have them, but they fall in love with women like Mirabelle because they want a certain, specific part of them. — Steve Martin

I love comedy. That's what got me into the arts. I don't even know how to categorize myself anymore. — Steve Martin

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. — Steve Martin

Being on Twitter is like having a fern. — Steve Martin

When I first started doing my comedy act, I just desperately needed material. So I took literally everything I knew how to do on stage with me, which was juggling, magic and banjo and my little comedy routines. I always felt the audience sorta tolerated the serious musical parts while I was doing my comedy. — Steve Martin

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. — Steve Martin

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

A father carries pictures where his money used to be. — Steve Martin

It was so sweet backstage, you should have seen it: The Teamsters were helping Michael Moore into the trunk of his limo. — Steve Martin

Don't have sex man. It leads to kissing and pretty soon you have to start talking to them. — Steve Martin

I have no fear, no fear at all. I wake up, and I have no fear. I go to bed without fear. Fear, fear, fear, fear. Yes, 'fear' is a word that is not in my vocabulary. — Steve Martin

All I've ever wanted was an honest week's pay for an honest day's work. — Steve Martin

Halle Berry is here, whose win last year broke down barriers for unbelievably hot women. — Steve Martin

She is nearing forty and not so easily forgiven as when her skin bloomed like roses. — Steve Martin

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? — Steve Martin

Hollywood must be the only place on earth where you can be fired by a man wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a baseball cap. — Steve Martin

No, no, I could never be a woman. I'd just stay at home and play with my breasts all day. — Steve Martin

I might not seem like the type who could sit at an outdoor cafe drinking a latte, but I am. Why? No motion required. It's just sitting. Sitting and sipping. I can't imagine a neurosis that would prevent one from raising one's arm to one's mouth while holding a cup, though given time, I'm sure I could come up with one. — Steve Martin

Dinosaurs did not walk with humans. The evolutionary record says different. They gambled. — Steve Martin

I don't think comic timing is the same as music timing, but I definitely find that I've learned from just writing in general that songs can be narrative without having a story. — Steve Martin

Whether I'm involved in creating something or not, it's a personal issue of do I respect it. But you can only know that five or ten years later. — Steve Martin

The bluegrass community ... can be very strict. I didn't know if I'd be welcomed into the bluegrass community or not, but I think they judge you very fairly ... I felt really welcome. — Steve Martin

A joke that works is complete knowledge in a nanosecond ... — Steve Martin

And after his unparsable response, including a passage where he said he was 'blurring the boundaries between a thing and thought,' she said, 'Thank you, I get lost sometimes,' while laying two fingers on his folded arm. — Steve Martin

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. — Steve Martin

I was always very shy but as I get older I think, What am I being shy for? You just grow weary of your own hang-ups. — Steve Martin

It's so beautiful where I am today that it makes me wonder where I am. — Steve Martin

All of life's riddles are answered in the movies. — Steve Martin

You want to know how I think art should be taught to children? Take them to a museum and say, 'This is art, and you can't do it. — Steve Martin

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. — Steve Martin

Had his room been facing west he would have noted the sparkling twenty-five-mile vista to the sea which looks almost like the Mediterranean. He would have noted how the streets of L.A. undulate over short hills as though a finger is poking the landscape from underneath. How 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. Had he been facing seaward on a balcony overlooking the city the writer might have heard drifting out of a tiny apartment window the optimistic voice of a shower singer imbued with the conviction that this is a place where it is possible to be happy. — Steve Martin

I've got to keep breathing. It'll be my worst business mistake if I don't. — Steve Martin

Art as an aesthetic principle was supported by thousands of years of discernment and psychic rewards, but art as a commodity was held up by air. The loss of confidence that affected banks and financial instruments was not affecting cherubs, cupids and flattened popes. The objects hadn't changed: what was there before was there after. But a vacancy was created with the clamoring crowds deserted and retrenched. — Steve Martin

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. — Steve Martin

Nothing I do is done by popular demand. — Steve Martin

I'm not a human being. I'm despicable and disgusting - but that's where the money is. — Steve Martin

I was always a huge fan of E. E. Cummings. He did a series of lectures at Harvard or Princeton, and they were recorded. And they were incredibly moving. — Steve Martin

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. — Steve Martin

An apology? Bah! Disgusting! Cowardly! Beneath the dignity of any gentleman, however wrong he might be. — Steve Martin

I'm always looking for something to engage my imagination and take me on a little mental voyage. I just want a new topic in my life. — Steve Martin

I couldn't see his face, because the light came in from behind him and he was in shadow, and he said, "I am Picasso." And I said, "Well, so what? — Steve Martin

The Serzone is a gift from God that frees her from the immobilising depression that would otherwise surround her and seep into her body like a poisonous fog. The drug distances the depression from her, although it is never out of sight ... The depression she battles is not the newly acquired symptom of a young woman now living in Los Angeles on her own. It was first set in the bow in Vermont, where she grew up, and fired as a companion arrow that has travelled with her ever since. — Steve Martin

'Dirty Rotten Scoundrels' is a good one because it not only turned out, I think, to be a really funny movie but it was also a delight to shoot. We were in the South of France, working with Glenne Headly and Michael Caine and Frank Oz the director - who were just fun. — Steve Martin

Knowledge of means without knowledge of ends is animal training. — Steve Martin

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. — Steve Martin

They want me on the television shows now because I did so well on Celebrity Assholes. — Steve Martin

It's a mystery to me the way that contemporary art galleries function. — Steve Martin

The emotions of men, however, were of a different order. They were pesky annoyances, small dust devils at her feet. Her knack for causing heartbreak was innate, but her vitality often made people forgive her romantic misdeeds. — Steve Martin

I'm for the Wall Street Occupiers. But will they accept me when they find out I sell packaged mortgage default instruments to children? — Steve Martin

I'm tired of wasting letters when punctuation will do, period. — Steve Martin

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

I happened to take a photo, and there was my wife, my dog and my banjo, all in the same shot - and I thought, "Oh, that's like a family portrait right there." — Steve Martin

When I was in college, I really liked poetry. I don't read much anymore. — Steve Martin

It was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking. These nights are accidental and statistical: Like lucky cards in poker, you can count on them occurring over time. What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the abominable circumstances. — Steve Martin

The environment changed with Martha Stewart and Enron. — Steve Martin

I am a wild and crazy guy! — Steve Martin

My most persistent memory of stand - up is of my mouth being in the present and my mind being in the future: the mouth speaking the line, the body delivering the gesture, while the mind looks back, observing, analyzing, judging, worrying, and then deciding when and what to say next. Enjoyment while performing was rare - enjoyment would have been an indulgent loss of focus that comedy cannot afford. — Steve Martin

The divided world of Aspen, where locals with a sense of entitlement were pitted against developers with a sense of condominiums. — Steve Martin

I like the idea that one thing leads to another. You can tweet something completely innocuous, and then find yourself going off on a tangent that's inspired by a response. — Steve Martin

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

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. — Steve Martin

I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper. — Steve Martin

You can't make something beautiful by trying to make something beautiful. Something becomes beautiful in the process of trying to be something else. — Steve Martin

I saw the movie, 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' and was surprised because I didn't see any tigers or dragons. And then I realized why: they're crouching and hidden. — Steve Martin

Thankfully, persistence is a great substitute for talent. — Steve Martin

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

I really enjoy finding the right word, creating a good, flowing sentence. I enjoy the rhythm of the words. — Steve Martin

Somewhere in the world is ... The world's worst doctor and he could be yours. — Steve Martin

I thought if I had a Twitter feed and say I had a following of a 100,000, that means 100,000 of them would be interested in my book. It was logical, but it didn't turn out to be true. It turned out if I had a Twitter feed of a 100,000, four of them were interested in my book. — Steve Martin

Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke. — Steve Martin

As we get older we either become our worst selves or our best selves — Steve Martin

If you're studying geology, which is all facts, as soon as you get out of school you forget it all, but philosophy you remember just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life. — Steve Martin

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. — Steve Martin

Comedy is a distortion of what is happening, and there will always be something happening. — Steve Martin

I loved to make people laugh in high school, and then I found I loved being on stage in front of people. I'm sure that's some kind of ego trip or a way to overcome shyness. I was very kind of shy and reserved, so there's a way to be on stage and be performing and balance your life out. — Steve Martin

Thankfully, perseverance is a good substitute for talent. — Steve Martin

Mirabelle is attractive; it's just that she is never the first or second girl chosen. — Steve Martin

Always...no wait...never..... — Steve Martin

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. — Steve Martin

I never had a movie that I wanted to do turned down in my whole life. I always write the script first so it speaks for itself. — Steve Martin

When I die, now don't think that I'm a nut, don't want no fancy funeral, just one like old King Tut. — Steve Martin

I believe that Ronald Reagan will someday make this country what it once was ... an arctic wilderness. — Steve Martin

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. — Steve Martin

I find animated movies very touching. They reach an audience that's hard to get with a live-action film. — Steve Martin

Writing is extremely personal, and that's the joy of it for me. — Steve Martin

I don't really manage my time. I really just wait until I'm inspired to do something. And when I'm inspired to do something, it just happens. — Steve Martin

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. — Steve Martin

I loved magic, and so I would practice my magic tricks in front of a mirror for hours and hours and hours because I was told that you must practice, you must practice and never present a trick before it's ready. — Steve Martin

You know, there's a moment when you're famous when it's unbearable to go out because you're too famous. And then there's a moment when you're famous just right. — Steve Martin

I opened the show with this line: I have decided to give the greatest performance of my life! Oh, wait, sorry, that's tomorrow night. — Steve Martin

Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration. — Steve Martin

The dawn breaks everything, including the mood from the night before. — Steve Martin

He knows only what is right in front of him; she is aware of every incoming sensation that glances obliquely against her soft, fragile core — Steve Martin

To have someone play off and be with a band is more pleasurable. — Steve Martin

I think there are people out there writing original bluegrass songs, but it's hard to get them out on the air. — Steve Martin

I will do anything to look like him - except, of course, exercise or eat right. — Steve Martin