Steve Martin Quotes

I don't know really. I've always been interested in the small picture instead of the big one, and I've always been interested in relationship pictures.

Things that made me happy five, six years ago don't make me happy anymore.

I think it would be very difficult to maintain one kind of art or whatever for your whole life. I think it's unrealistic.

You've just got to focus on you, yourself, your family, your team... and all the rest is just fluff.

Fight scenes, comedy - all are insignificant to me at a personal level.

As your life expands your focus expands or contracts.

[S]omething inside us, the feeling of resentment, the feeling that wants to get one's own back, must be simply killed. I do not mean that anyone can decide this moment that he will never feel it anymore. That is not how things happen. I mean that every time it bobs its head up, day after day, year after year, all our lives long, we must hit it on the head. It is hard work, but the attempt is not impossible.

How much do people really want to learn? I mean, some people get into a groove and they stay with it indefinitely. And what starts off as a great moment of explosive passion can end up as cabaret 25, 30 years later. It just depends on whether you go and find the right habitat to extend yourself.

The reason I shift gears constantly, why I'm doing an opera, why I've done essays, why I've written poetry for years that nobody wanted, why I do short stories and novels and screenplays... is so I will have new ways of failing. This means becoming a student again.

When you have the opportunity to choose projects, inevitably you start being moved towards the things that you're moved by, right? And that changes over time, as we change, right?

I've been trying to write for as long as I can remember. But those first fifteen years didn't produce much of great interest. I mean, it embarrasses me very much to look back on my early poems--very few lines of any merit at all and lots of affectation. But there were quite a lot of them. That's a point in one's favor.

I mean I’m 16 and 17 years wiser now. So if I could do it when I was 18 with a guy, I can certainly do it at 33 with a lady.

Looking back now across fifteen years I could see with great clarity the fear I had lived in, which must mean that in the interval I had succeeded in a very important undertaking: I must have made my escape from it.

In 24 years in the movie business, you have a lot of doors slammed in your face, and a lot of people say mean things. Every time, I'm constantly surprised at how the span of time gets quicker that I get okay with it, and I'm over it. That's been an interesting thing to learn.

Please stop putting quotes from Nietzsche at the end of your emails. Five years ago you were laughing your guts out over American Pie 2. What — suddenly you’ve magically turned into Noam Chomsky?

It was just cool to see my friends so inspired, and I'm by no means the biggest rapper in the world, but I'm on my way up. I feel like I'm going to keep going and delivering good music every time. It was cool to show people that it's real to do what you want to do.

I hope that this year, you make mistakes. If you do, then it means you have tried, learned, lived, pushed yourself, changed you and your world, and most importantly, you've done something.

I don't care about being Fetty Wap. Like, this doesn't mean anything to me. My plan was to make sure that my son would be good, and I have a daughter now, so now she's included into the equation, and the work I do as Fetty Wap made me care.

Actually, years mean nothing. It's what's inside them.

You can't expect to be the same person you were three years ago. Some people expect you to be and can't come to terms with the fact that if a year has elapsed between LPs, that means one year's worth of changes. The material consequently is affected by that, the lyrics are affected by that... the music too.

Had you told me 20 years ago this would be my life, I'd have gone "What?" and then stuck out my tongue to all the girls that were mean to me.

I think I'm one of those people that needed to be seen by someone else to see myself. But then on the other hand, the way I do my work, I always try to only completely focus on my work, so when I do my work I'm only interested in my character. So I don't have an idea of what it means for my career. So this is why I don't feel like I need to be discovered, because I feel like even without being discovered, I will be fine.

Being a musician, being a person who's playing tours and making records is a part-time thing for me at age. I did it, I lived it and I breathed it every day of my life for 30-odd years and now I am slowing down a little bit. But it does not mean that I am any less intense and dedicated to the work that I am doing now. I have other priorities in life as well.

Age is really just a number to me and means every year I get to experience so much more.