Steve Martin Quotes - Page 9

Ah, yes. I remember my first beer.

I feel good about being able to take bluegrass on to television like 'Letterman' and 'The View,' and I've heard nice things about being able to do that. I really haven't felt any negativity toward me or my music.

'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.

Rebelliousness really is the province of young people-that kind of iconoclasm.

We've taken what was just once a racetrack and made it a multifaceted gaming destination for the entire region.

I've put an umbrella in my mouth and opened it. I sat in a lemon-meringue pie. I've done terrible things to my dog with a fork.

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.

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.

When the person beside you is making you alert and keen and the idea of being with anyone else is not imaginable.

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.

It is the perfect wrong time for Jeremy to do to Mirabelle what she had done to him - call him up for a quick fix - because;, in a sense, she is now betrothed. Her first date with someone who treated her well obligates her to faithfulness, at least until the relationship is explored.

So, I can hurt now, or hurt later.

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...

How is it possible to miss a woman whom you kept at a distance, so that when she was gone you would not miss her?

People come up to me and say "Steve, what is film editing?" And I say "How should I know? You're the director.

I used to think a wedding was a simple affair. Boy and girl meet, they fall in love, he buys a ring, she buys a dress, they say I do. I was wrong. That's getting married. A wedding is an entirely different proposition.

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.

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?

I just wanted to be in show business. I didn't care if I was going to be an actor or a magician or what. Comedy was a point of the least resistance, really. And on the simplest level, I loved comedy.

I've always believed that there are funny people everywhere, but they're just not comedians. In fact, some of my best comedic inspirations were not professional entertainers.

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.

If he thinks he would harm Mirabelle, he would back away. But he does not yet understand when and how people are hurt. He doesn't understand the subtleties of slights and pains, that 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.

Knowledge of means without knowledge of ends is animal training.

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?

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.