Quotes By 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.

I cringe at backstory. Because it never quite explains or gets into some psychological thing that is never quite right and never quite the truth and who knows why someone is some way.

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.

I'm enamored with the art world. 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.

I've got to keep breathing. It'll be my worst business mistake if I don't.

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

In my banjo show with the Steep Canyon Rangers, I do do comedy during that show. It'd be absurd just to stand there mute and play 25 banjo songs.

I like a woman with a head on her shoulders. I hate necks.

I loved doing 'Pennies from Heaven.' Because you have to understand that I'd been doing comedy for 15 to 20 years, and suddenly along came the opportunity to do this beautiful film. It was so emotional to me. I loved it. I don't think it was a good career move, but I have no regrets about doing it.

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.

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.

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

The banjo is truly an American instrument, and it captures something about our past.

I believe that sex is one of the most beautiful, natural, wholesome things that money can buy.

What is comedy? Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke.

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.

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

I've always believed that there are funny people everywhere, but they're just not comedians. In fact, some of my best comedic inspirations were not professional entertainers.

I actually credit Twitter with fine-tuning some joke-writing skills. I still feel like I'm working at it.

Well, today the Grammys is much much better than the Oscars. I think the differences in the shows are that the Grammys are much wilder. The Oscars is much more people in the industry. And people dress wilder, I think, at the Grammys.

When your hobbies get in the way of your work - that's OK; but when your hobbies get in the way of themselves... well.

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

I like all kinds of music. I listen to Abigail Washburn, the Punch Brothers, and Marc Johnson, the great clawhammer player. I also listen a lot to Sirius Radio, there's a lot of bluegrass there.

Don't have sex man. It leads to kissing and pretty soon you have to start talking to them.

Boy, those French: they have a different word for everything!

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.

I think there are people out there writing original bluegrass songs, but it's hard to get them out on the air.

I believe that Ronald Reagan will someday make this country what it once was... an arctic wilderness.

I realized that comedians of the day were operating on jokes and punch lines. The moment you say the punch line, the audience either laughs sincerely or they laugh automatically or they don't laugh. The thing that bothered me was that automatic laugh. I said, that's not real laughter.

I did stand-up comedy for 18 years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four years were spent in wild success. I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a byproduct. The course was more plodding than heroic.