Quotes from Steve Martin

DID STAND-UP COMEDY for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success.

The conversation at dinner hadn't been successful either; it bore the marks of an old married couple who had very little left to say to each other.

The Feynman Dilemma A diner says to a waiter, "What's this fly doing in my soup?" And the waiter says, "It looks like the backstroke." Yet if the same scene is viewed while plunging into a black hole at the speed of light, it will look like a Mickey Mouse lunch pail from the thirties, except that Mickey's head has been replaced by a Lincoln penny

Mirabelle's ambition is about one-tenth of 1 percent of what would be called normal. ... She is not aware that some people fight like alley cats for desirable situations. She presents a résumé, fills out an application, waits, and finally makes a call to see if she got the job. Usually, a confused secretary will answer and say that the position had been filled weeks ago. This aimlessness in presenting herself contributes to her feeling of being adrift.

Now that I had assigned myself an act without jokes, I gave myself a rule. Never let them know I was bombing

These experiences have caused him to think very hard about what he is doing and where he is going. And the result of all this thinking is that he now understands that he doesn't know what he is doing or where he is going.

What would any man do with a soggy girl who can't assert herself, who has a weak voice, and whose main personality component is helplessness?

She has learned that her body is precious and it mustn't be offered carelessly ever again, as it holds a direct connection to her heart.

Free love, man, Free Love! Which, by the way, was the single greatest concept a young man has ever heard. About three years late, women got wise an my frustration returned to normal levels.

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.

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

Life exists so the Universe can experience itself.

It's late. Need place to rehearse Dead Guy. I lie at bottom of stairs. Wife comes home. Do I break character? Never. She dials shrink.

Carl Reiner. He had an entrenched sense of glee; he used humor as a gentle way of speaking difficult truths;

As we get older we either become our worst selves or our best selves

My plan was to walk by on my side of the street and not look over her way. This, I felt, was a very clever masculine move: to meet and ultimately seduce through no contact at all. She would be made aware of me as a mysterious figure, someone with no need of her whatsoever. This is compelling to a woman.

This does not mean you are "losing it" or are "not playing with a full deck" or are "not all there" or that you're "eating with the dirigibles" or "shellacking the waxed egg" or "looking inside your own mind and finding nothing there," or any of the other demeaning epithets that are said about people who are peeling an empty banana.

I see other people crossing the street at the curb and I don't know how they can do it.

In psychoanalysis, you try to retain a discovery; in art, once the thing is made, you let it go.

When you work in the glove department at Neiman's, you are selling things that nobody buys anymore.

She has simply never quite learned to walk or hold herself comfortably, which makes her come off as an attractive wallflower.

If there were a silent observer, Mirabelle would be seen as a carefree, happy girl who is preparing for a night on the town. But in reality, these activities are the physical manifestations of her stillness.

Everything was dragging me toward the arts; even the study of modern philosophy suggested that philosophy was nonsense.

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