Steve Martin

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

“Some people have a way with words, and other people...oh, uh, not have way.”

“Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol.”

“I really enjoy finding the right word, creating a good, flowing sentence. I enjoy the rhythm of the words.”

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

“Boy, those French! They have a different word for everything.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“she is nearing forty and not so easily forgiven as when her skin bloomed like roses.”

“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.”

“It's a mystery to me the way that contemporary art galleries function.”

“I cringe at backstory. Because it never quite explains or gets into some psychological thing that is never quite right and never quite the truth and who knows why someone is some way.”

“What I mean is that none of my talents had a - what's that great word - rubric. A singer, an actor, a dancer - there was nothing I could really say I was. The writing came much later. And, actually, thank God, because if I had said I'm a singer, I would really have just had one thing to do.”

“When I was in college, I was debating to try my hand at show business, or to become a professor. I just thought of the risk of not going into show business and always wondering if I would've had a chance. Because that's where my real heart was.”

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

“Love is a promise delivered already broken.”

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

“Theories, for me, are just about freeing your mind. It doesn't mean the theory is going to work like a scientific theory works. It's about freeing your mind and making you think a different way.”

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

“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.”

“I've run into people in my life who were so dramatic; people who are so extreme and so frustrating to be around that you end up thinking about them and talking about them for literally years after your experience with them is over. I've had that happen to me, and I've seen it happen to other people....”

“I don't think anyone is ever writing so that you can throw it away. You're always writing it to be something. Later, you decide whether it'll ever see the light of day. But at the moment of its writing, it's always meant to be something. So, to me, there's no practicing; there's only editing and pub...”

“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.”

“I was always a huge fan of E. E. Cummings. He did a series of lectures at Harvard or Princeton, and they were recorded. And they were incredibly moving.”

“'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.”

“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 first thought maybe I'd do a banjo presentation record, where I'd play a couple of songs and get a bunch of other players to do the rest. Then I realized I had enough of my own songs to do an album of them.”

“When I finally retire, I just want to go away so no one has to listen to me.”

“Well, today the Grammys is much much better than the Oscars. I think the differences in the shows are that the Grammys are much wilder. The Oscars is much more people in the industry. And people dress wilder, I think, at the Grammys.”

“Comedy may be big business but it isn't pretty.”

“When your hobbies get in the way of your work - that's OK; but when your hobbies get in the way of themselves... well.”

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

“There's a lot of thought in art. People get to talk about important things. There's a lot of sex, you know, in art. There's a lot of naked women and men, and there's intrigue, there's fakery. It's a real microcosm of the larger world.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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 s...”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I'm tired of wasting letters when punctuation will do, period.”

“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.”

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

“L.A. is only where you live, because otherwise it's just a sprawling mass of everything, and I think if you live in L.A., you get a little network of places you go, and people you see, and when you leave town, you do miss those places and your friends.”

“No matter how many times people say it - 'Oh, I'm just writing this for myself' 'Oh, I'm just doing this for myself' - nobody's doing it for themselves! You're doing it for an audience. So whether I'm performing or writing a book or playing music, it's definitely to be put out there and to be receiv...”

“I like the idea that one thing leads to another. You can tweet something completely innocuous, and then find yourself going off on a tangent that's inspired by a response.”

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

“I understood that as much as I had resisted the outside, as much as I had constricted my life, as much as I had closed and narrowed the channels into me, there were still many takers for the quiet heart.”

“Thankfully, persistence is a great substitute for talent.”

“Be so good they can't ignore you.”

“I like a woman with a head on her shoulders. I hate necks.”

“I believe in equality. Equality for everybody. No matter how stupid they are or how superior I am to them.”

“You know that look that women get when they want to have sex? Me neither.”

“Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes.”

“I love money. I love everything about it. I bought some pretty good stuff. Got me a $300 pair of socks. Got a fur sink. An electric dog polisher. A gasoline powered turtleneck sweater. And, of course, I bought some dumb stuff, too.”

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

“Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke.”

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

“It's so hard to believe in anything anymore. I mean, it's like, religion, you really can't take it seriously, because it seems so mythological, it seems so arbitrary...but, on the other hand, science is just pure empiricism, and by virtue of its method, it excludes metaphysics. I guess I wouldn't be...”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I'm enamored with the art world. 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.”

“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.”

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

“I believe that Ronald Reagan will someday make this country what it once was... an arctic wilderness.”

“I'm enamored with the art world.”