Steve Martin Quotes

People have to decide on priorities if they want to get anywhere. The best lessons I learned was to just do it.

If you wait until you feel like doing something, you will likely never accomplish it.

This week I've been reading a lot and doing little work. That's the way things ought to be. That's surely the road to success.

How comfortable some of us become as we nestle in the web of procrastination. It is a false haven of rest for those who are content to live without purpose, commitment, or self-discipline.

I have to be motivated, and I'm sure time will avail itself.

I couldn't understand why my productivity went down when I had deliberately made more time available to write. Then I realized it was because I wasn't flying as much.

Sometimes I decide I don't want to write because it isn't the thing for me to be doing right then, and I go do something else.

I don't know how I can be so ambitious and so lazy at the same time.

You have to keep busy. After all, no dog's ever pissed on a moving car.

I'm learning skills I will use for the rest of my life by doing homework...procrastinating and negotiation.

Live now. Procrastinate later.

If you were to fault yourself in one of three areas, which would it be: (1) the inability to prioritize; (2) the inability or desire to organize around those priorities; or (3) the lack of discipline to execute around them? ... Most people say their main fault is a lack of discipline. On deeper thought, I believe that is not the case. The basic problem is that their priorities have not become deeply planted in their hearts and minds. They haven't really internalized Habit 2 [Begin with the end in mind].

In theory I can do almost anything; certainly I have been told how. In practice I do as little as possible. I pretend to myself that I would be quite happy in a hermit's cave, living on gruel, if someone else would make the gruel. Gruel, like so many other things, is beyond me.

You never put off until tomorrow or even this afternoon what you can do this morning. Attack the objective when your desire is strongest.

You don't need endless time and perfect conditions. Do it now. Do it today. Do it for twenty minutes and watch your heart start beating.

Laziness is the one common deficiency in mankind that blocks the establishment of a perfect world in which everyone leads a happy life.

I said to myself, 'If you don't sit down to it today, when will you ever sit down to it?'

It's just one day, one twenty-four-hour period to get yourself through. - Adam

Very few people know how to work. Inspiration, everybody has inspiration. That's just hot air.

The best cure for procrastination is to have so much on your plate that procrastination is no longer an option.

There's a realization that you have to do something but you just can't do it all the time.

When I am idle and shiftless, my affairs become confused; when I work, I get results ... not great results, but enough to encourage me.

The how-to is all about day in, day out finding a way to feed the monster, the drive that lives inside.

I procrastinate, and I push writing to the last available moment, because I don't like to settle on anything. I guess you can call it indecision or you can call it holding out for inspiration.

I would never finish a painting if I didn't have a deadline.