Steve Martin Quotes

Mirabelle is not affected by a man’s failures to approach her, as her own self-depreciating attitude never allows the idea that he would in the first place.

She had destroyed whatever was between us by making a profound gaffe: She met me.

The emotions of men, however, were of a different order. They were pesky annoyances, small dust devils at her feet. Her knack for causing heartbreak was innate, but her vitality often made people forgive her romantic misdeeds.

If he thinks he would harm Mirabelle, he would back away. But he does not yet understand when and how people are hurt. 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.

What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation. This type of laugh seemed stronger to me, as they would be laughing at something they chose, rather than being told exactly when to laugh.

introductions are hard to come by when your natural state is shyness

"I couldn't see his face, because the light came in from behind him and he was in shadow, and he said, "I am Picasso." And I said, "Well, so what?

I guess I wouldn't believe in anything anymore if it weren't for my lucky astrology mood watch.

she is nearing forty and not so easily forgiven as when her skin bloomed like roses.

...teaching is, after all, a form of show business.

...a young man, Jamaican, perhaps, his head circled in a scarf with sunbleached dreadlocks on piled on top, looking like a plate of soft-shell crabs.

She looked down again and I was stymied. I sat. Oh, this was enough to make me love her, because I was right with her, understanding every second and longing to step in. I didn’t even need to know the specific that was troubling her, because to me her halting voice easily stood for the general woe that hangs in the air, even on life’s happiest days.

Comedy is a distortion of what is happening, and there will always be something happening.

Being on Twitter is like having a fern.

So, while fitting in, she was like a wicked detail standing out against a placid background.