Quotes from Steve Martin

In spite of her depression, Mirabelle likes to think of herself as humourous. She can, when the occasion calls, become a wisecracker and buoyant party girl. This mood, Mirabelle thinks, sometimes makes her the centre of attention at parties and gatherings. The truth is that these episodes of gaiety merely raise her to normal, but for Mirabelle the feeling is so exceptional that she believes herself to be standing out.

If you occasionally wonder how I know about some of the events I describe in this book, I don't. I have found that--just as in real life--imagination sometimes has to stand in for experience.

She started converting objects of beauty into objects of value.

Lacey was just as happy alone as with company. When she was alone, she was potential; with others she was realized. Alone, she was self-contained, her tightly spinning magnetic energy oscillating around her. When in company, she had invisible tethers to anyone in the room: as they moved away, she pulled them in.

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

Thinking too much also creates the illusion of causal connections between unrelated events.

Be tasteless, rude, and offensive, Live in a swamp and be three dimensional, Put a live chicken in your underwear, Get all excited and go to a yawning festival.

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.

But my mother was aglow. She had a continuing fascination with celebrities, and now she had one of her own. She was never moved by what I was doing (in an interview she said, He writes his own material, I'm always telling him he needs a new writer)…

The overhead lights reflect in the glass countertop and mingle in the gray and black of the gloves, resulting in a mother-of-pearl swirl that sometimes sends Mirabelle into a shallow hypnotic dream.

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.

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

I'm smart enough to know that Elizabeth had no doubt seen dozens of men leap over curbs without her falling in love with the leaper, but I do believe this: When an endeavor is special in a person's life, others discern it intuitively and appreciate it more, like the praise a child receives for a lumpy clay sculpture. And as ordinary as such an event might be, it can be instilled with uncommon power.

Finally, we do become wise, but then it's too late

She has simply never quite learned to walk or hold herself comfortably

Harder you Try, Luckier you get

Mirabelle is not sparkling tonight, because she works only in gears, and tonight she is in the wrong gear. Third gear is her scholarly, perspicacious, witty self; second gear is her happy, giddy, childish self; and first gear is her complaining, helpless, unmotivated self. Tonight she is somewhere midshift, between helpless and childish.

The dictionary is a perfect example of overalphabetization, with its harsh rules and every little word neatly in place. It almost makes me want to go on a diet of grapes and waste away to nothing.

An artist who painted a face was now 'playing with the idea of portraiture,' or 'exploring push-pull aesthetics,' or toying with contradictions like 'menacing-slash-playful,' but he or she was never, ever, just painting a face.

One day I was particularly gloomy, and Jim asked me what the matter was. I told him my high school girlfriend (for all of two weeks) had broken up with me. He said, "Oh, that'll happen a lot." The knowledge that this horrid grief was simply a part of life's routine cheered me up almost instantly.

In a sense, this book is not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know. Yes, these events are true, yet sometimes they seemed to have happened to someone else, and I often felt like a curious onlooker or someone trying to remember a dream. 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.

They told me to just act like myself. When I said, How do I do that? they said to just have fun with it, but I'm not sure what they meant.

The woman speaks, stops, then after what must have been a long speech by the person on the other end of the line, says, ... just remember, darling, it is pain that changes our lives. Mirabelle cannot fathom the meaning of this sentence, as she has been in pain her whole life, and yet it remains unchanged.

The auction houses seemed not as dull as their financial counterparts on Wall Street, where parents of daughters imagined glass celings and bottom patting.