Steve Martin Quotes

I knew already when I was seven years old, that I wanted to be on stage and entertain people. I sell laughs. Here, you got one for free!

With Twitter, you just want to make people laugh in their meeting; on stage, people have paid for their tickets with their hard-earned money, so I owe them the truth as I experience it.

The success of any stand-up act comes out of life experience.

The first time I got on stage I was 10 years old and I did impressions. I did cartoon characters and I really got the bug for this life when I saw that people were laughing and saw the attention I was getting.

I was always sort of a ham as a kid, just always wanting to entertain and to get people to laugh.

When you are doing stand-up comedy, you are the writer, producer, director, sometimes bouncer.

Whether you do stand-up comedy or write a story, you have a duty to deliver. As a comedian, you walk out on stage, and you have a minute to hook them, or they'll start booing. As a writer, it's very similar. A reader doesn't have time to say, 'I'll give him 50 pages, as it's not very good yet, but I hope it'll get better.'

Stand up is really fun because if I think of a joke or a funny idea, then I can just go and tell some people and if they laugh, they laugh right away.

I like entertaining people. I like being on stage. I like being in the life. This is what I do. This is the only thing I know how to do besides rob people and fight. Even when I was robbing people, I was entertaining them. But that's just what I love doing.

People come out to see you perform and you've got to give them the best you have within you.

Shall I crack any of those old jokes, master, At which the audience never fail to laugh?

I love those people who do story-telling and who ramble on, but I don't do that, I tell jokes - the sort of jokes that anyone really could tell in the pub.

Being onstage and performing, the high of that, and people coming to see you, and getting to make them laugh - that's what gets me hyped up. It's a nervous excitement.

I feel joy when I do a great show. I get fun out of making other people happy. I'm a terminal people-pleaser. I suppose that's why I'm a frontman.

I know how to make an audience laugh, 'cause I grew up on Third Rock from the Sun, week after week in front of audiences, making them laugh.

I remember doing a lot of comedy. I always loved that feeling when you do something on stage and you can feel the vibe of the audience turn, and they start laughing. It's how you know something's not right, and how to fix it, or how to make the moment stronger or funnier.

I always wanted to be in the world of entertainment. I just love the idea of an audience being happy with what I am doing. Writing is showbusiness for shy people. That's how I see it.

The whole thing about working in front of the camera is to make people laugh when they're not supposed to.

I have fun doing movies, I’ve had fun doing the animated show, and I certainly have fun doing standup. Even that, even though it’s just me talking, it’s also interaction with the crowd.

There's always something every night that I learn from reacting to what the audience is reacting to. You learn what to leave out, what to put in, if you need a little more comedy or more drama.

Many more people saw me on TV than will ever get to see me on stage, but I do love being in the same room as the people I'm telling the story to.

Being a stand-up is my mission in life; it's my passion. My ongoing goal is to simply be funny, on my own, in front of a roomful of strangers.

Stand-up, for me, is really more of an addiction, so you have to feed the beast whenever you can.

You have to do stand-up quite a long time before you learn how to do it well. It was probably years before I was confident enough in stand-up that I was able to talk about the things I wanted to talk about, the way I wanted to talk about them.

I've always seen myself as one of those 'show people.' My earliest memories are wanting and needing to entertain people, like a gypsy traveler who goes from place to place, city to city, performing for audiences and reaching people.