Steve Martin Quotations | Page 4

To have someone play off and be with a band is more pleasurable.

The streets of L.A. undulate over short hills as though a finger is poking the landscape from underneath ... laid over this crosshatch are streets meandering on the diagonal creating a multitude of ways to get from one place to another by traveling along the hypotenuse. These are the avenues of the tryst which enable Acting Student A to travel the eighteen miles across town to Acting Student B's garage apartment in nine minutes flat after a hot-blooded phone call at midnight.

My problem is that I don't get the same exhiliration from success as I get depression from failure.

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.

When I die, now don't think that I'm a nut, don't want no fancy funeral, just one like old King Tut.

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 publishing or not publishing.

The only thing that bothers me is if I'm in a restaurant and I'm eating and someone says, 'Hey, mind if I smoke?' I always say, 'No. Mind if I fart?

There is something going on now in Mexico that I happen to think is cruelty to animals. What I'm talking about, of course, is cat juggling.

There's someone out there for everyone-even if you need a pickaxe, a compass, and night goggles to find them.

I've been writing for a long time, since the late '60s. But it hasn't been in the same form. I used to write scripts for television. I wrote for my comedy act. Then I wrote screenplays, and then I started writing New Yorker essays, and then I started writing plays. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the New Yorker essays, but they were comic. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the '90s. In my head, there was a link between everything. One thing led to another.