Top 50 Steve Martin Quotes

You want to be a bit compulsive in your art or craft or whatever you do. You want to be focused on it.

Throughout my whole life, as a performer, I’ve never played with a band. I’ve always played alone, so I was never required to stay in rhythm or anything. So it was a real different experience for me to start playing with a band. There were so many basic things for me to learn.

A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.

I was raised with ‘Laurel and Hardy’ and ‘I Love Lucy’ and Jerry Lewis, and I just loved it. And I had a friend in high school and we would just laugh all day and put on skits. You know, it’s the Andy Kaufman thing or the Marty Short thing where you’re performing in your bedroom for yourself.

You want to be a bit compulsive in your art or craft or whatever you do.

I was not naturally talented. I didn’t sing, dance or act, though working around that minor detail made me inventive.

I think I meant that, given the circumstances of my childhood, I had the illusion that it’s easier to be alone. To have your relationships be casual and also to pose as a solitary person, because it was more romantic. You know, I was raised on the idea of the ramblin’ man and the loner.

I never thought much about success early on. I only thought about being a comedian – or just being in show business, is really more accurate.

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.

Well, excuuuuuse me!

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.

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.

You know what your problem is, it’s that you haven’t seen enough movies – all of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.

Nothing I do is done by popular demand.

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.

There is one thing I would break up over, and that is if she caught me with another woman. I won’t stand for that.

Most comedies are really hard to write, or to watch, because you kind of generally know what’s coming.

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

Everything is fraught with danger. I love technology and I love science. It’s just always all in the way you use it. So there’s no – you can’t really blame anything on the technology. It’s just the way people use it, and it always has been.

I loved doing ‘Pennies from Heaven.’ Because you have to understand that I’d been doing comedy for 15 to 20 years, and suddenly along came the opportunity to do this beautiful film. It was so emotional to me. I loved it. I don’t think it was a good career move, but I have no regrets about doing it.

Tweeting is really only good for one thing – it’s just good for tweeting… It is rewarding, because it’s just its own reward. It’s sort of like heaven.

I never thought about success. I always thought about doing the job at hand. My goal was getting through the show that night.

I just believe that the interesting time in a career is pre-success, what shaped things, how did you get to this point.

With comedy, you have no place to go but more comedy, so you’re never off the hook.

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.

In my banjo show with the Steep Canyon Rangers, I do do comedy during that show. It’d be absurd just to stand there mute and play 25 banjo songs.

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.

I actually credit Twitter with fine-tuning some joke-writing skills. I still feel like I’m working at it.

‘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.

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.

The real joy is in constructing a sentence. But I see myself as an actor first because writing is what you do when you are ready and acting is what you do when someone else is ready.

I don’t like to look back, and I’m always worried about the next thing rather than resting on the laurels or the degradations of the last thing.

Love is a promise delivered already broken.

When I was in college, I really liked poetry. I don’t read much anymore.

I got a flue shot and now my chimney works perfectly.

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.

I’ve got to keep breathing. It’ll be my worst business mistake if I don’t.

I believe that sex is one of the most beautiful, natural, wholesome things that money can buy.

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

A record isn’t like a movie – you can get it together pretty fast.

I’m tired of wasting letters when punctuation will do, period.

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

Boy, those French: they have a different word for everything!

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.

It’s a mystery to me the way that contemporary art galleries function.

I have thought about some kind of musical involving my music. That would be kind of interesting. I have thought of it in that way, as a creator of something, not so much a performer. So that’s in my head.

What is a movie star? A movie star is many things. They can be tall, short, thin, or skinny. They can be Democrats… or skinny.

When your hobbies get in the way of your work – that’s OK; but when your hobbies get in the way of themselves… well.

I think when I was young, let’s call it high school, and even before that, I just loved comedy, and I loved comedians. I grew up watching Laurel and Hardy. That’s really a long time ago. I loved Jerry Lewis. I just loved comedians.

Comedy may be big business but it isn’t pretty.