Steve Martin is a multifaceted American actor, comedian, writer, musician, and producer, celebrated for his iconic blend of absurd humor and clever wit. Rising to prominence in the 1970s through his stand-up comedy and frequent appearances on “Saturday Night Live,” Martin quickly became a household name. He transitioned seamlessly into film, starring in comedic classics such as “The Jerk,” “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” and “Father of the Bride.” Martin’s comedic style often involves wordplay, physical comedy, and surrealism, captivating audiences with his unpredictable antics. Beyond his work in comedy, he is also an accomplished banjo player and has released several albums showcasing his musical talents. With numerous awards, including Emmys, Grammys, and an honorary Academy Award, Steve Martin remains a beloved figure in entertainment, admired for his creativity, versatility, and enduring contributions to comedy and the arts.
Steve Martin Quotes
1. “Be so good they can’t ignore you.”
— Steve Martin
2. “Thankfully, persistence is a great substitute for talent.”
— Steve Martin
3. “A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.”
— Steve Martin
4. “It’s pain that changes our lives.”
— Steve Martin
5. “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.”
— Steve Martin
6. “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.”
— Steve Martin
7. “Be undeniably good.”
— Steve Martin
8. “I thought yesterday was the first day of the rest of my life but it turns out today is.”
— Steve Martin
9. “The conscious mind is the editor, and the subconscious mind is the writer.”
— Steve Martin
10. “The greatest thing you can do is surprise yourself.”
— Steve Martin
11. “Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke.”
— Steve Martin
12. “Or is it that I think too much?”
— Steve Martin
13. “Writer’s block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol.”
— Steve Martin
14. “I’ve got to keep breathing. It’ll be my worst business mistake if I don’t.”
— Steve Martin
15. “The operation was a success, but I’m afraid the doctor is dead.”
— Steve Martin
16. “I’ve heard lots of people lie to themselves but they never fool anyone.”
— Steve Martin
17. “How to make a million dollars: First, get a million dollars.”
— Steve Martin
18. “I saw the movie, ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ and was surprised because I didn’t see any tigers or dragons. And then I realized why: they’re crouching and hidden.”
— Steve Martin
19. “I believe in equality. Equality for everybody. No matter how stupid they are or how superior I am to them.”
— Steve Martin
20. “No art comes from the conscious mind.”
— Steve Martin
21. “I like a woman with a head on her shoulders. I hate necks.”
— Steve Martin
22. “A father carries pictures where his money used to be.”
— Steve Martin
23. “First the doctor told me the good news: I was going to have a disease named after me.”
— Steve Martin
24. “It’s not the size of the nose that matters, it’s what’s inside that counts.”
— Steve Martin
25. “Chaos in the midst of chaos isn’t funny, but chaos in the midst of order is.”
— Steve Martin
26. “I don’t really manage my time. I really just wait until I’m inspired to do something. And when I’m inspired to do something, it just happens.”
— Steve Martin
27. “All I’ve ever wanted was an honest week’s pay for an honest day’s work.”
— Steve Martin
28. “I believe that sex is one of the most beautiful, natural, wholesome things that money can buy.”
— Steve Martin
29. “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.”
— Steve Martin
30. “There’s someone out there for everyone-even if you need a pickaxe, a compass, and night goggles to find them.”
— Steve Martin
31. “I guess I wouldn’t believe in anything anymore if it weren’t for my lucky astrology mood watch.”
— Steve Martin
32. “I was always very shy but as I get older I think, What am I being shy for? You just grow weary of your own hang-ups.”
— Steve Martin
33. “I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper.”
— Steve Martin
34. “How many people have never raised their hand before?”
— Steve Martin
35. “I will do anything to look like him – except, of course, exercise or eat right.”
— Steve Martin
36. “You know when you’re telling these little stories? Here’s a good idea: have a point. It makes it so much more interesting for the listener!”
— Steve Martin
37. “You know that look that women get when they want to have sex? Me neither.”
— Steve Martin
38. “Love is a promise delivered already broken.”
— Steve Martin
39. “I handed in a script last year and the studio didn’t change one word. The word they didn’t change was on page 87.”
— Steve Martin
40. “Women have choices, and men have responsibilities.”
— Steve Martin
41. “Always make room for the unexpected in yourself.”
— Steve Martin
42. “As much as I remember, I just thought, I want to sing a song that starts normal and ends crazy.”
— Steve Martin
43. “Teaching is a form of show business.”
— Steve Martin
44. “I cannot smell mothballs because it’s so difficult to get their little legs apart.”
— Steve Martin
45. “My problem is that I don’t get the same exhiliration from success as I get depression from failure.”
— Steve Martin
46. “I could never be a woman, ’cause I’d just stay home and play with my breasts all day.”
— Steve Martin
47. “I was deeply unhappy, but I didn’t know it because I was so happy all the time.”
— Steve Martin
48. “I’m not a human being. I’m despicable and disgusting – but that’s where the money is.”
— Steve Martin
49. “I have no fear, no fear at all. I wake up, and I have no fear. I go to bed without fear. Fear, fear, fear, fear. Yes, ‘fear’ is a word that is not in my vocabulary.”
— Steve Martin
50. “As we get older we either become our worst selves or our best selves.”
— Steve Martin
51. “I’ve decided to take up smoking, my doctor said I wasn’t getting enough tar.”
— Steve Martin
52. “I believe you should place a woman on a pedestal: high enough so you can look up her dress.”
— Steve Martin
53. “Ah, yes. I remember my first beer.”
— Steve Martin
54. “If I screw up raising my kids, nothing I achieve will matter much.”
— Steve Martin
55. “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?”
— Steve Martin
56. “If you’re studying Geology, which is all facts, as soon as you get out of school you forget it all, but Philosophy you remember just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life.”
— Steve Martin
57. “So, I can hurt now, or hurt later.”
— Steve Martin
58. “Always do business as if the person you’re doing business with is trying to screw you, because he probably is. And if he’s not, you can be pleasantly surprised.”
— Steve Martin
59. “She tried to get even with him through psychological warfare but couldn’t, because he didn’t care.”
— Steve Martin
60. “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
61. “I got a flue shot and now my chimney works perfectly.”
— Steve Martin
62. “Nothing I do is done by popular demand.”
— Steve Martin
63. “A friend of mine once asked how to make it in show business and I said “Be so good that they can’t ignore you.” She thought I was being flip but it’s true. The challenge is trying to live up to the opportunities given me.”
— Steve Martin
64. “I’m always looking for something to engage my imagination and take me on a little mental voyage. I just want a new topic in my life.”
— Steve Martin
65. “I just gave my cat a bath. Now how do I get all this fur off my tounge?”
— Steve Martin
66. “You kill me and I’ll see that you never work in this town again.”
— Steve Martin
67. “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
68. “The Apple Pie Hubbub was a significant novel for me, because that’s when I first started using verbs.”
— Steve Martin
69. “It’s not tipping I believe in. It’s overtipping.”
— Steve Martin
70. “When I die, now don’t think that I’m a nut, don’t want no fancy funeral, just one like old King Tut.”
— Steve Martin
71. “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.”
— Steve Martin
72. “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.”
— Steve Martin
73. “Boy, those French: they have a different word for everything!”
— Steve Martin
74. “I am a wild and crazy guy!”
— Steve Martin
75. “A kiss may not be the truth, but it is what we wish were true.”
— Steve Martin
76. “The banjo is such a happy instrument – you can’t play a sad song on the banjo – it always comes out so cheerful.”
— Steve Martin
77. “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.”
— Steve Martin
78. “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.”
— Steve Martin
79. “I actually learned about sex watching neighborhood dogs. And it was good. Go ahead and laugh. I think the most important thing I learned was: Never let go of the girl’s leg, no matter how hard she tries to shake you off.”
— Steve Martin
80. “I can juggle. I started juggling as a kid. And when I worked at Disneyland, I knew a juggler there named Christopher Faire, and he taught me how to juggle. I used it in my comedy act for a while.”
— Steve Martin
81. “Relationships end, but they don’t end your life. But people do often spending more time finding out about failed relationships than finding successful ones.”
— Steve Martin
82. “To be with another woman, that is French. To be caught, that is American.”
— Steve Martin
83. “There are few takers for the quiet heart.”
— Steve Martin
84. “I didn’t worry if a bit got no response, as long as I believed it had enough response to linger.”
— Steve Martin
85. “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.”
— Steve Martin
86. “An apology? Bah! Disgusting! Cowardly! Beneath the dignity of any gentleman, however wrong he might be.”
— Steve Martin
87. “You can’t really conduct your life by one or two phrases.”
— Steve Martin
88. “When someone less capable is ahead of me, I am not pleased. It makes me insane.”
— Steve Martin
89. “As a school board we felt it’s an unfair expense to families. The lawsuit has a certain logic to it – if you have free public education, you can’t put these things on top of it. It defeats the purpose.”
— Steve Martin
90. “A celebrity is any well-known TV or movie star who looks like he spends more than two hours working on his hair.”
— Steve Martin
91. “A remarkable memoir that’s packed with anecdotes, advice and humor, all while maintaining a high level of dignity and self-awareness.”
— Steve Martin
92. “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.”
— Steve Martin
93. “She was feeling her bohemian oats.”
— Steve Martin
94. “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.”
— Steve Martin
95. “I actually credit Twitter with fine-tuning some joke-writing skills. I still feel like I’m working at it.”
— Steve Martin
96. “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
97. “A triangle with four points is what Euclid rides into hell.”
— Steve Martin
98. “Writing is something I took up rather than anything I had an inclination toward. I like acting -delivering someone else’s message – but writing is more of an accomplishment.”
— Steve Martin
99. “Hollywood must be the only place on earth where you can be fired by a man wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a baseball cap.”
— Steve Martin
100. “I think when the movie ‘Roxanne’ came out, which I also had written, I felt something new that I never felt, which was respect.”
— Steve Martin
101. “If you’ve got a dollar and you spend 29 cents on a loaf of bread, you’ve got 71 cents left; But if you’ve got seventeen grand and you spend 29 cents on a loaf of bread, you’ve still got seventeen grand. There’s a math lesson for you.”
— Steve Martin
102. “The banjo is truly an American instrument, and it captures something about our past.”
— Steve Martin
103. “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.”
— Steve Martin
104. “I really enjoy finding the right word, creating a good, flowing sentence. I enjoy the rhythm of the words.”
— Steve Martin
105. “I just downloaded eleven hundred books onto my Kindle, and now I can’t lift it.”
— Steve Martin
106. “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.”
— Steve Martin
107. “I have found that – just as in real life – imagination sometimes has to stand in for experience.”
— Steve Martin
108. “After one of my plays came out, I had mixed reviews, some bad and some good. One day, it dawned on me. I thought, ‘I wrote a play and he wrote a review, and that’s the difference between him and me.’”
— Steve Martin
109. “I think communication is so firsbern.”
— Steve Martin
110. “You know, a lot of people come to me and they say, “Steve, how can you be so funny?” There’s a secret to it, it’s no big deal. Before I go out, I put a slice of bologna in each of my shoes. So when I’m on stage, I feel funny.”
— Steve Martin
111. “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.”
— Steve Martin
112. “It’s not what you know, it’s what you think you know.”
— Steve Martin
113. “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.”
— Steve Martin
114. “You can’t make something beautiful by trying to make something beautiful. Something becomes beautiful in the process of trying to be something else.”
— Steve Martin
115. “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…”
— Steve Martin
116. “Why sip from a tea cup, when you can drink from the river.”
— Steve Martin
117. “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.”
— Steve Martin
118. “College totally changed my life. It changed what I believe and what I think about everything. I majored in philosophy.”
— Steve Martin
119. “If you feel tired midway through, give Neil Patrick Harris a Red Bull and throw some sheet music at him.”
— Steve Martin
120. “I have heard it said that a complicated childhood can lead to a life in the arts. I tell you this story of my father and me to let you know I am qualified to be a comedian.”
— Steve Martin
121. “To me, torture would be, “I can’t think what to write in the next sentence. I’m stuck.” Torture would be if you didn’t have the next idea.”
— Steve Martin
122. “I never touched a gun in my life. That and that alone forever doomed me to middle management.”
— Steve Martin
123. “I’m tired of wasting letters when punctuation will do, period.”
— Steve Martin
124. “Kids like my act because I’m wearing nose glasses. Adults like my act because there’s a guy who thinks putting on nose glasses is funny.”
— Steve Martin
125. “All of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.”
— Steve Martin
126. “I’m the leader of the platoon and I run gambling and lotteries, dances and I sell beer illegally. I’m a con man and I’m thoroughly lovable.”
— Steve Martin
127. “Comedy is a distortion of what is happening, and there will always be something happening.”
— Steve Martin
128. “Don’t have sex man. It leads to kissing and pretty soon you have to start talking to them.”
— Steve Martin
129. “She had destroyed whatever was between us by making a profound gaffe: She met me.”
— Steve Martin
130. “With comedy, you have no place to go but more comedy, so you’re never off the hook.”
— Steve Martin
131. “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.”
— Steve Martin
132. “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.”
— Steve Martin
133. “Halle Berry is here, whose win last year broke down barriers for unbelievably hot women.”
— Steve Martin
134. “The course was more plodding than heroic. I did not strive valiantly against doubters but took incremental steps studded with a few intuitive leaps.”
— Steve Martin
135. “We’ve taken what was just once a racetrack and made it a multifaceted gaming destination for the entire region.”
— Steve Martin
136. “He never complicates a desire by overthinking it, unlike Mirabelle, who spins a cocoon around an idea until it is immobile.”
— Steve Martin
137. “I’m not trying to be a big shot or anything like that, but I get my drinks half price.”
— Steve Martin
138. “I find animated movies very touching. They reach an audience that’s hard to get with a live-action film.”
— Steve Martin
139. “Lord loves a workin’ man; don’t trust whitey.”
— Steve Martin
140. “With comedy, you never know until you put it in front of an audience. You shoot it and a year later you have no idea if it’s going to work. And then you get the response. It’s great when it’s good.”
— Steve Martin
141. “Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration.”
— Steve Martin
142. “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.”
— Steve Martin
143. “With a cheery delicacy she divided my obsessions into three categories: acceptable, unacceptable, and hilarious.”
— Steve Martin
144. “Comedians don’t get Oscars, so I gave up on that a long time ago. And I can’t really speak about the Oscar-worthiness of my own performance.”
— Steve Martin
145. “Lots of women are getting involved. They’re not satisfied just being passengers anymore.”
— Steve Martin
146. “When you’re reaching for a star, there’s a long way to fall.”
— Steve Martin
147. “Performing music is a way to do comedy, but without the obligation to do a solid hour, hour and half of a standup. I could intersperse it with music, so it became a really good format for me.”
— Steve Martin
148. “I’m trying to think of other ones. Oh, yeah, I’d say – somebody would buy something and we’d say, and because you are our hundredth customer today, you get a free paperback.”
— Steve Martin
149. “I would assign every lie a color: yellow when they were innocent, pale blue when they sailed over you like the sky, red because I knew they drew blood. And then there was the black lie. That’s the worst of all. A black lie was when I told you the truth.”
— Steve Martin
150. “I started a grease fire at McDonald’s – threw a match in the cook’s hair.”
— Steve Martin
