Steve Martin Quotes

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Steve Martin

Profession : Comedian

Birth : August 14, 1945

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

Steve Martin

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

Steve Martin

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

Steve Martin

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.

Steve Martin

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.

Steve Martin

I believe entertainment can aspire to be art, and can become art, but if you set out to make art you're an idiot.

Steve Martin

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.

Steve Martin

I'm enamored with the art world.

Steve Martin

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.

Steve Martin

Movies always are open to being remade because times change so much, and the tempo of movies changes. I think of it like a James Bond. They can have different actors play the same role... I've had people come up to me and say, 'We want to remake 'The Jerk' with so and so.' And I say, 'Fine.' It just doesn't bother me. It's an honor actually.

Steve Martin

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.

Steve Martin

I would get records by Earl Scruggs... I would tune my banjo down and I'd pick out the songs note by note. Learned how to play that way. I persevered. There was a book written by Pete Seeger, who showed you some basic strumming and some basic picking... And I kind of worked out my own style of playing.

Steve Martin

The bluegrass community... can be very strict. I didn't know if I'd be welcomed into the bluegrass community or not, but I think they judge you very fairly... I felt really welcome.

Steve Martin

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

Steve Martin

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

Steve Martin

I thought if I had a Twitter feed and say I had a following of a 100,000, that means 100,000 of them would be interested in my book. It was logical, but it didn't turn out to be true. It turned out if I had a Twitter feed of a 100,000, four of them were interested in my book.

Steve Martin

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.

Steve Martin

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.

Steve Martin

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 received in some way, definitely.

Steve Martin

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

Steve Martin