Steve Martin Quotes

I could dream it forever and still not do it, but when the time comes for it to be done, God, I want to be ready for it, to be ready for the moment of convergence between the thing done and the doing of it, between the thing to be made and its maker. At that moment, I am speaking for everyone; I am dreaming for the billions yet to come; I am taking part of us that cannot be understood by God, and letting it bleed from the wrist onto the canvas. And it can only be made, because I have felt these things: my lust, my greed, my hatred, my happiness.

Sure, I've gotten some disbelieving stares when I've tried to explain this little habit of mine to, say, a bus seatmate. I've watched a guy adjust his posture, or get up and move back several rows, even if it meant he now sat next to someone else who was clearly on the verge of some other kind of insanity.

Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.

Free love, man, Free Love! Which, by the way, was the single greatest concept a young man has ever heard. About three years late, women got wise an my frustration returned to normal levels.

When you work in the glove department at Neiman's, you are selling things that nobody buys anymore.

I’m so depressed today. I just found out this ‘death thing’ applies to me.

You know that look that women get when they want to have sex? Me neither.

I might not seem like the type who could sit at an outdoor cafe drinking a latte, but I am. Why? No motion required. It's just sitting. Sitting and sipping. I can't imagine a neurosis that would prevent one from raising one's arm to one's mouth while holding a cup, though given time, I'm sure I could come up with one.

both you and paintings are layered… first, ephemera and notations on the back of the canvas. Labels indicate gallery shows, museum shows, footprints in the snow, so to speak. Then pencil scribbles on the stretcher, usually by the artist, usually a title or date. Next the stretcher itself. Pine or something. Wooden triangles in the corners so the picture can be tapped tighter when the canvas becomes loose. Nails in the wood securing the picture to the stretcher. Next, a canvas: linen, muslin, sometimes a panel; then the gesso - a primary coat, always white. A layer of underpaint, usually a pastel color, then, the miracle, where the secrets are: the paint itself, swished around, roughly, gently, layer on layer, thick or thin, not more than a quarter of an inch ever — God can happen in that quarter of an inch — the occasional brush hair left embedded, colors mixed over each other, tones showing through, sometimes the weave of the linen revealing itself. The signature on top of the entire goulash. Then varnish is swabbed over the whole. Finally, the frame, translucent gilt or carved wood. The whole thing is done.

In the deeper hours of the night I began to look at myself, to consider myself and my condition, to measure the life I'd led so far. I did not know what made me this way. I did not know of any other way I could be. I did not know what was inside me or how I could redeem what was hidden there. There must be a key or person or thing, or song or poem or belief, or old saw that could access it, but they all seemed so far away, and after I drifted further and further into self-absorption, I closed the evening with this desolate thought: there are few takers for the quiet heart.

She was feeling her bohemian oats.

Um dia sem sol é como, você sabe, noite.

He doesn’t understand the subtleties of slights and pains, that it is not the big events that hurt the most but rather the smallest questionable shift in tone at the end of a spoken word that can plow most deeply into the heart.

With a cheery delicacy she divided my obsessions into three categories: acceptable, unacceptable, and hilarious.

Now that I had assigned myself an act without jokes, I gave myself a rule. Never let them know I was bombing