"The course was more plodding than heroic: I did not strive valiantly against doubters but took incremental steps studded with a few intuitive leaps."
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Quote collection
Steve Martin quotes (page 11 of 17)
339 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"When you're reaching for a star, there's a long way to fall."
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"These days it's hard to look at a poodle without thinking what a good meal he would make."
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"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."
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"In talking to girls I could never remember the right sequence of things to say. I'd meet a girl and say, Hi, was it good for you too? If a girl spent the night, I'd wake up in the morning and then try to get her drunk."
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"Acting keeps me alert to people, and life. I don't know, there's something about going to work early in the morning, and having to stay alert and concentrated. Maybe that keeps your mind alive."
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"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."
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"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..."
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"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."
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"So, I can hurt now, or hurt later."
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"Romance takes place when you first fall in love. It stirs all emotions and you can manipulate and be manipulated."
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"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."
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"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."
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"The banjo is truly an American instrument, and it captures something about our past."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"A remarkable memoir that's packed with anecdotes, advice and humor, all while maintaining a high level of dignity and self-awareness."
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"The presence of excessive wealth puts an unnatural spin on the appreciation of art."
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"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."
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