Steve Martin
Home to me is when someone comes up to me and says, "Can I get a selfie?" No. It's where your wife and your family are. It's the emotional place where you feel like you're not away from it.Collection: Home
I believe in eight of the ten commandments. I believe in going to church every Sunday... unless there's a game on.Collection: Funny
Romance takes place when you first fall in love. It stirs all emotions and you can manipulate and be manipulated.Collection: Falling In Love
If you saw her in these moments, you might think she was collecting her thoughts in order to go forward. But I see it another way: Her mind is being overwhelmed by two processes that must simultaneously proceed at full steam. One is to deal with and live in the present world. The other is to re-experience and mourn something that happened long ago. It is as though her lightness pulls her toward heaven, but the extra gravity around her keeps her earthbound.Collection: Thinking
I knew I wanted to be in show business so I took the path of least resistance. I loved comedy. But you never know you are funny until people laugh. It's just what I was interested in. I could make people laugh, I guess, but doing it at school and doing it onstage are very different things.Collection: School
I was not self-destructive, though I almost destroyed myself. In the end, I turned away from stand-up with a tired swivel of my head...Collection: Tired
I love doing my surreal sing-along that had words that no one could follow.Collection: Surreal
I can understand the drug thing. So they feel that it's more important to take the drugs than to do a good show for the people.Collection: People
So, I can hurt now, or hurt later.Collection: Hurt
The self-prepared dinner is a great time killer for lonely people and as much time should be spent on it as possible.Collection: Lonely
I happened to take a photo, and there was my wife, my dog and my banjo, all in the same shot - and I thought, "Oh, that's like a family portrait right there."Collection: Dog
I just don't identify myself with a place. I just don't get it. Like, why am I cheering for this town? Towns are good and bad but they don't have principles, constitutions. You wouldn't go to war for your town.Collection: Cheer
There are some people that will not pick up a phone and call you, but if you knock on a door and talk to them, they'll talk back to you.Collection: Phones
We've taken what was just once a racetrack and made it a multifaceted gaming destination for the entire region.Collection: Taken
I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a byproduct.Collection: Originality
Stand-up life is really hard. At one point, I got so paralyzed I could write five screenplays before I could write three jokes for stand-up. Later, I've finally allowed myself to relax quite a bit, to think I can do it because I've done it in the past. The pressure to come up with the material is the same but the anxiety about whether I can do it is gone.Collection: Writing
I never had a movie that I wanted to do turned down in my whole life. I always write the script first so it speaks for itself.Collection: Writing
It's like painting the same blank canvas over and over and over and over and over. Once the concept is known, you don't need to see two. And that was in the back of my head, that I was really done artistically with what I had created or pastiched.Collection: Two
I take editing seriously. It's a joy to edit. I always hand a manuscript to several editors and can't wait to get back their notes and see what they've said. I don't criticize myself for making blunders here and there, because it's just natural. You write in chunks, and you may not remember that that sentence you wrote yesterday had the same word repeated three times. I do enjoy that. I love the feeling of repairing. Repairing is really nice.Collection: Nice
Anyone who's ever worked with Meryl Streep always says the same thing: can that woman act! And what's with all the Hitler memorabilia?Collection: Memorabilia
He gave her his phone number, in a peculiar reversal of dating procedure. She might have considered kissing him, even after the horrible first date, but he just didn’t seem to know what to do. However, Jeremy does have one outstanding quality. He likes her. And this quality in a person makes them infinitely interesting to the person who is being liked.Collection: Kissing
It's funny that some ideas start with a little "What if?" and then suddenly you're spending a million dollars to shoot the scene and hoping that it works.Collection: Ifs And
If he thinks he would harm Mirabelle, he would back away. But he does not yet understand when and how people are hurt. He doesn't understand the subtleties of slights and pains, that it is not the big events that hurt the most but rather the smallest questionable shift in tone at the end of a spoken word that can plow most deeply into the heart.Collection: Hurt
Knowledge of means without knowledge of ends is animal training.Collection: Knowledge
The conscious mind is the editor, and the subconscious mind is the writer. And the joy of writing, when you're writing from your subconscious, is beautiful - it's thrilling. When you're editing, which is your conscious mind, it's like torture.Collection: Beautiful
Somewhere in the world is...The world's worst doctor and he could be yours.Collection: Doctors
I knew I could only play Cyrano if he were Americanized. I had no intention of writing the script myself. I was afraid of it. You're playing with fire when you tamper with a classic. So I went looking for a writer. But it was such a personal idea, and anyone I would give it to would make it his own. It's hard to ask Neil Simon to write your idea.Collection: Writing
Mirabelle replaces the absent friends with books and television mysteries of the PBS kind. The books are mostly nineteenth-century novels in which women are poisoned or are doing the poisoning. She does not read these books as a romantic lonely hearts turning pages in the isolation of her room, not at all. She is instead an educated spirit with a sense of irony. She loves the gloom of these period novels, especially as kitsch, but beneath it all she finds that a part of her indentifies with all that darkness.Collection: Lonely
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.Collection: School
For a while, Mirabelle believes there will be a moment when he will cave in and let himself love her, but eventually she lets the idea go. She hits bottom. She dwells in the muck for several months, not depressed exactly, but involved in a mourning that at first she thinks is for Ray but soon realizes is for the loss of her old self.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Running
People come up to me and say "Steve, what is film editing?" And I say "How should I know? You're the director.Collection: Editing
How is it possible to miss a woman whom you kept at a distance, so that when she was gone you would not miss her?Collection: Distance
I used to think a wedding was a simple affair. Boy and girl meet, they fall in love, he buys a ring, she buys a dress, they say I do. I was wrong. That's getting married. A wedding is an entirely different proposition.Collection: Girl
I think films are about having a good time, so I don't know that there's a message. The message of a film is always what a critic writes, and the fun of a film or the emotion of a film is what the audience feels.Collection: Fun
To have someone play off and be with a band is more pleasurable.Collection: Play
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.Collection: War
Ah, yes. I remember my first beer.Collection: Beer
When the person beside you is making you alert and keen and the idea of being with anyone else is not imaginable.Collection: Ideas
I would like a wine. The purpose of the wine is to get me drunk. A bad wine will get me as drunk as a good wine. I would like the good wine. And since the result is the same no matter which wine I drink, I'd like to pay the bad wine price.Collection: Wine
I've decided to take up smoking, my doctor said I wasn't getting enough tar.Collection: Doctors
Rebelliousness really is the province of young people-that kind of iconoclasm.Collection: People
I've put an umbrella in my mouth and opened it. I sat in a lemon-meringue pie. I've done terrible things to my dog with a fork.Collection: Dog
What means the most to me changes through the years. There was a time when movies meant the most. But when I'm concentrating on a project, that's what means the most to me.Collection: Mean
I really like the animated film process. It's kind of like doing a play, because you can experiment with it, rewrite it, screen it, go back, then work on it a little bit more. If the joke doesn't work, you can fix it. It's different from a live action movie.Collection: Play
It is the perfect wrong time for Jeremy to do to Mirabelle what she had done to him - call him up for a quick fix - because;, in a sense, she is now betrothed. Her first date with someone who treated her well obligates her to faithfulness, at least until the relationship is explored.Collection: Perfect
I believe Ronald Reagan can make this country what it once was... an Arctic region covered with ice.Collection: Funny
Some nights, alone, he thinks of her, and some nights, alone, she thinks of him. Some night these thoughts, separated by miles and time zones, occur at the same objective moment, and Ray and Mirabelle are connected without ever knowing it.Collection: Night
There's no better way to learn something than to learn it in front of an audience. Your terror drives you.Collection: Way