Steve Martin Years Quotations

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.

Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration.

I ignored my stand-up career for 25 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.

Your only guidepost is your own instinct and judicious editing. In my stand-up act I learned that in the first 10 minutes I could say anything and it would get a laugh. Then I'd better deliver. In the movie it's the same thing. You get a lot of laughs when people first sit down and then the story better kick in. Many years in front of an audience, I would hope, give me a sense of what works.

I studied with the Maharishi for many years, and really didn't learn that much. But one thing that he taught me, I'll never forget: 'ALWAYS...' no, wait-- 'NEVER...' no, wait, it was 'ALWAYS carry a litter bag in your car. It doesn't take up much room, and if it gets full, you can toss it out the window.'

Whether I'm involved in creating something or not, it's a personal issue of do I respect it. But you can only know that five or ten years later.

I was very vulnerable to criticism for many years. I could read a bad review and remember it my whole life.

I hope people find my movies funny and will watch them years from now. And, in terms of writing, I hope that something remains that will not seem old-fashioned, that will still have a ­vibrancy to it 50 years from now.

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.

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.

The lure in art collecting and its financial rewards, not counting for a moment its aesthetic, cultural and intellectual rewards, is like the trust in paper money: it makes no sense when you really think about it. New artistic images are so vulnerable to opinion that it wouldn't take much more than a whim for a small group of collectors to decide that a contemporary artist was not so wonderful anymore, was so last year.

Halle Berry is here, whose win last year broke down barriers for unbelievably hot women.

Communication has changed so rapidly in the last 20 years, it's almost impossible to predict what might occur even in the next decade. E-mail, which now sends data hurtling across vast distances at the speed of light, has replaced primitive forms of communication such as smoke signals, which sent data hurtling across vast distances at the speed of light.

The teen years are extremely serious and everything matters and every insult really hurts. I know there are cliques and bullying. And you don't yet ­understand that it will all go away.