Quotes About Steve Martin

“I'm not interested in stories about movie stars. I couldn't care less what Steve Martin has on his mind.”

— Pete Hamill

“The only thing I really recommend, if you're starting out in stand-up is to not try to copy anybody else. You can be influenced by people. I was influenced by Steve Martin and Bob Newhart and Woody Allen, but I never tried to be someone else. I always tried to be myself. And the reason people are successful is they're unique.”

— Ellen DeGeneres

“All of our heroes did silly stuff early and got more serious as time went on. Steve Martin, Adam Sandler, Bill Murray. They got older, wiser, and made different choices.”

— Akiva Schaffer

“One of the interesting things about Twitter is looking how famous people choose to use it. Take someone like Steve Martin, who I follow: it's all sorts of comic gems, nothing private, nothing personal - all jokes. Other celebrities are overtly personal - like Charlie Sheen. I do a mix of observations and updates.”

— Rob Lowe

“Steve Martin is one of the most intelligent, well-read human beings that I've ever come across. He is equally as funny off screen as he is on. But he also has a very intellectual side, and he's a really nice human being. We actually become good friends.”

— Anthony LaPaglia

“I had always loved comedy, and acted out Steve Martin and Bill Cosby albums with my sister for my parents on road trips and stuff, and I loved to laugh and make people laugh.”

— Rob Delaney

“You know what your problem is, it's that you haven't seen enough movies - all of life's riddles are answered in the movies.
Steve Martin”

— Steve Martin

“To discuss a Martin Amis book, you must first discuss the orchestrated release of a Martin Amis book. In London, which rightly prides itself on the vibrancy of its literary cottage industry, Amis is the Steve Jobs of book promoters, and his product rollouts are as carefully managed as anything Apple dreams up.”

— Graydon Carter

“My interest in magic was kindled by Steve Martin, the comedian I'd gone to high school with.”

— Gary McCord

“I did stand-up. I loved George Carlin and Steve Martin.”

— Steve Buscemi

“I was a huge fan of comedy and movies and TV growing up, and I was able to memorize and mimic a lot of things, not realizing that that meant I probably wanted to be an actor. I just really, really amused myself and my friends with memorizing entire George Carlin or Steve Martin albums.”

— Hank Azaria

“I'm sort of shy, and Twitter feels like chatting all day with a group. I like to follow people. I'm following Joel Osteen, Steve Martin, and an anonymous purple egg - just to see where they go with it.”

— Maria Bamford

“I would like to be someone like Steve Martin. That's the path I'd like to follow.”

— Carrot Top

“A man should be rugged like Steve McQueen; the way he stands, like he's ready for something. Or he should be a man of the world like Dean Martin.”

— Maureen McCormick

“I wrote a post about wanting to buy a banjo - a $300 banjo, which is a lot of money, and I don't play instruments; I don't know anything about music. I like music, and I like banjos, and I think I probably heard Steve Martin playing, and I said, 'I could do that.' And I said to my husband, I said, 'Ben, can I buy a banjo?' And he's like, 'No.'”

— Mena Grabowski Trott

“I always tell people that to be the funny person in a Steve Martin movie is like getting a call that Keith Moon wants you to play drums on his record. He should be playing drums on his record.”

— Jason Schwartzman

“Steve Martin is such an exquisite and precise writer. Everything is so clear; it's like a bell. He says what he means and says it so beautifully.”

— Jason Schwartzman

“Certainly early on, I kind of modeled myself after Steve Martin and Bill Murray. I would imitate them sometimes.”

— Jeff Garlin

“When I talk to Steve Martin, he's joyful when he talks about comedy.”

— David Steinberg

“That's where humour lives for me. In the body. The Steve Martin kind of stuff or Jim Carrey, that's what I like. I've always felt that's what I would like to do.”

— Al Pacino

“My ultimate is Peter Sellers - his ability to go broad and somehow humanize that and be hilarious at the same time. He was just relatable, real at the same time as insane. I find Ricky Gervais absolutely hilarious. Steve Martin is another hero of mine - he's a genius.”

— Hank Azaria

“I love watching movies with happy endings or anything with Steve Martin or stuff like that.”

— Bonnie Tyler

“The first piece I ever collected was a Roy Lichtenstein: a sculpture called 'Surrealist Head II'. There was a waiting list. I remember Steve Martin wanted one, and I wanted one. I got the 'Surrealist Head', and I was thrilled.”

— Jeff Koons

“Steve Martin said that philosophy is good for comedy because it screws up your thinking just enough, and I agree with that. Being forced to see life's metadata is good training for looking for interesting angles on a topic.”

— Chris Hardwick

“I'd love to work with Steve Martin. I'd love to work with Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd.”

— Chris Pratt

“Steve Martin is one of my favorite performers, writers, artists of all time.”

— Claire Danes

“Magic is the oldest part of the show business profession. It can now be used as a forward-thinking tool to build a child's confidence. It has been an amazing part in many entertainers' lives, including Steve Martin and the late Johnny Carson.”

— Criss Angel

“There's a lot of very funny people I'd love to work with that I've never met, of course. I love Steve Martin and Jim Carrey.”

— Dick Van Dyke

“When I first started looking at Twitter, I followed people like Steve Martin, who will just write the funniest non sequiturs now and then, which I thought was really fun. That's kind of the road I've taken. Every now and then, something comes into your mind and you put it out there. It's very innocuous. I think it's kind of fun.”

— Steve Carell

“The reason I do what I do is because I was influenced by Steve Martin, by Woody Allen, by Bob Newhart, by Carol Burnett, by Lucille Ball.”

— Ellen DeGeneres

“I really love Steve Martin and all the stuff he did in the '70s. I think it's really great.”

— Margaret Cho

“It's very, very corrupting to the spirit, doing comedy. And you have to be almost a saint, like Jack Benny was, like Steve Martin is, to avoid the corrupting of it, because there's very little work where the actual work and the reward are simultaneous, and comedy is that.”

— Mike Nichols

“Stand-up comedy is a very hard thing on the spirit. There are people who transcend it, like Jack Benny and Steve Martin, but in its essence, it's soul-destroying. It tends to turn people into control freaks.”

— Mike Nichols

“When I was a bit older I had all of the George Carlin records, all of the Steve Martin records, all of the Cheech and Chong records and all of the Richard Pryor records.”

— Marc Maron

“Because of my comedic-influence growing up, Mel Brooks, Jim Carrey, Steve Martin. A lot of Jeff comedic-influences included Charlie Chaplin and physical comedians of the silent-era. What we were able to do together is to show all these major influences but make it into our own comedy. We've seen the stereotypical boy-meets-girl story a hundred thousand times.”

— J. Robert Spencer

“One of the things about Steve Jobs is that he gives us an opportunity to look at the disjuncture between that world and the world he claimed that Apple represented, the "Think different" world of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and Gandhi.”

— Alex Gibney

“I'm a huge fan of Steve Martin. He's hilarious, but he has this depth to him and this way of dealing with the difficult things in life with a sense of humor that I think has helped me as an actress.”

— Alexandra Daddario

“Watching the news inspires me to keep going and reminds me why I should never complain. I'm inspired by those who don't let others define them: Martin Luther King Jr., James Dean, Vincent Van Gogh, Hillary Clinton, Tennessee Williams, director Steve McQueen. They've all changed the conversation by making their voices heard.”

— Robert Piper

“One time I was really close to Steve Martin. I was too afraid to actually go talk to him, but I'll count that as meeting.”

— Baron Vaughn

“I used humor to avoid being picked on as a kid. Or I would try and make my parents laugh, so I wouldn't get in trouble. But as a kid, I would watch Flip Wilson and I would memorize his whole routine, listen to Bill Cosby's records constantly, Steve Martin, Carol Burnett, Lucille Ball. I just drank that stuff up and loved it.”

— Wendi McLendon-Covey

“I was at a dinner party with a group of people, and we were talking about fake names. You know, how its difficult to come up with a really great fake name. Its a very specific type of gift. You don't want to go too far into the silly, and you don't want to go too far into the banal. I always thought one of the funniest names ever was Gern Blanston, which came from a Steve Martin routine on one of his early records.”

— Paul Rudd

“The Pink Panther wasn't shown to the press for reasons that soon became apparent when I saw it at a public performance. Two people (20 per cent of the audience) laughed; one was Chinese, the other, whom I couldn't see, might have been an escaped hyena. This laughless francophobic comedy stars its co-scriptwriter, Steve Martin, in what is, by my reckoning, his eighth lousy remake since 1989.”

— Philip French

“Roxanne came along in '86, when I was doing a lot of stand-up. I auditioned for the movie, and of course I was a huge Steve Martin fan, so I really hoped I would get this part. I don't think there was any part in particular that I auditioned for. I just went in and talked with them. There were so many parts in there, and so many comedians ended up getting in that movie, playing different firemen and townspeople.”

— Kevin Nealon

“She wasn't that tough on me, but I think she was often a little frightened - being a single parent. So it begets this quality of desired absoluteness that doesn't really exist. My sister could crack her up. She'd be getting into trouble and put the Steve Martin arrow through her head and mom would start to laugh. I didn't have the same sort of wiliness.”

— Ashley Judd

“I never imagined I would be in a film with Steve Martin. I was a little star struck, because I grew up watching his movies.”

— Beyonce Knowles

“I was amazed to go Oscar and win it. It was fantastic getting up on the stage there and looking down. I thought, "That guy looks like Steve Martin, and that guy's like Arnold Schwarzenegger." But it was Steve Martin, and it was Arnold Schwarzenegger. Then they have this terrible kind of conveyor belt backstage - literally - where they take you to this big hangar where the world's press are gathered, and they make you stand on a stage, and they introduce you.”

— Peter Capaldi

“It took me the bulk of my twenties to write one book about a family of alligator wrestlers. Whereas somebody like Steve Martin is releasing his latest banjo symphony, having just completed another movie and acclaimed, best-selling novel.”

— Karen Russell

“Both my parents recognized early on that I wanted to do something in comedy, and they were really supportive. They're the ones who bought me Steve Martin records and let me watch R-rated comedies long before they probably should have.”

— Chris Hardwick

“The earliest stand-up comedy I was aware of was Bill Cosby. I watched Saturday Night Live as soon as I was aware of it, and Monty Python used to be on PBS at weird hours, so I used to try to watch that. And I loved George Carlin on SNL, that was the first stand-up I ever really remember seeing on TV. And then Steve Martin. I guess I was in fifth or sixth grade when Steve Martin showed up, and he was instantly my idol. And Richard Pryor around the same time too, I sort of became aware of him, though I don't remember the first time I saw him.”

— Louis C.K.