Quotes from Steve Martin

Doing comedy alone onstage is the ego's last stand.

I am tired, so very tired of thinking about Lacey Yeager, yet I worry that unless I write her story down, and see it bound and tidy on my bookshelf, I will be unable to ever write about anything else.

She knows that she needs new friends but introductions are hard to come by when your natural state is shyness.

I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a by-product. The course was more plodding than heroic: I did not strive valiantly against doubters but took incremental steps studded with a few intuitive leaps.

Mirabelle attracts men of a different kind. They are shyer and more reticent. They look at her a long time before approaching, and when they do find something about her that they want, it is something simple within her.

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

At least Clarissa knows I'm benign. But that is not an adjective one wants to throw around about one's spouse: This is my husband. He's benign.

7 hour sleep diet worked great. Will power held beautifully.

Mirabelle, who never takes credit for her attractiveness, believes it is not she he is responding to, but rather something independent of her.

Mirabelle knows, and she lets this be unspoken, that all free things require conversation. Sitting in a darkened movie theatre requires absolutely no conversation at all, whereas a free date, like a walk down Hollywood Boulevard in the busy evening, requires comments, chatter, observations, and with luck, wit. She worries that since they have only exchanged perhaps two dozen words between them, these free dates will be horrible.

All this in no way discounts her attractiveness. Mirabelle is attractive; it's just that she is never the first or second girl chosen.

She appears sunny, a quality that Mirabelle can call upon only for special occasions.

You're nuts, but you're welcome here.

There is nothing too mysterious about Ray Porter, at least not in the usual sense of the word. He is single, he is kind, he tries to do the right thing, and he does not understand himself, or women, or his relationships with women.

Both scary and down-to-earth, he [John Belushi] once told me, 'I never yell at the staff, only the department heads'.

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

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.

When I moved out of the house at eighteen, I rarely called home to check up on my parents or tell them how I was doing. Why? The answer shocks me as I write it: I didn't know I was supposed to.

Um dia sem sol é como, você sabe, noite.

Enjoyment while performing was rare—enjoyment would have been an indulgent loss of focus that comedy cannot afford. After the shows, however, I experienced long hours of elation or misery depending on how the show went, because doing comedy alone onstage is the ego's last stand.

pinching my swollen fingers in between. Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.

Sure, I've gotten some disbelieving stares when I've tried to explain this little habit of mine to, say, a bus seatmate. I've watched a guy adjust his posture, or get up and move back several rows, even if it meant he now sat next to someone else who was clearly on the verge of some other kind of insanity.

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

I didn't even need to know the specific that was troubling her, because to me her halting voice easily stood for the general woe that hangs in the air, even on life's happiest days.