Steve Martin

When your hobbies get in the way of your work — that's OK; but when your hobbies get in the way of themselves... well.

Well, excuuuuuse me!

I believe that Ronald Reagan will someday make this country what it once was... an arctic wilderness.

You want to be a bit compulsive in your art or craft or whatever you do.

I realized that comedians of the day were operating on jokes and punch lines. The moment you say the punch line, the audience either laughs sincerely or they laugh automatically or they don't laugh. The thing that bothered me was that automatic laugh. I said, that's not real laughter.

I think there are people out there writing original bluegrass songs, but it's hard to get them out on the air.

A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.

I like a woman with a head on her shoulders. I hate necks.

I loved doing 'Pennies from Heaven'. Because you have to understand that I'd been doing comedy for 15 to 20 years, and suddenly along came the opportunity to do this beautiful film. It was so emotional to me. I loved it. I don't think it was a good career move, but I have no regrets about doing it.

I would get records by Earl Scruggs... I would tune my banjo down and I'd pick out the songs note by note. Learned how to play that way. I persevered. There was a book written by Pete Seeger, who showed you some basic strumming and some basic picking... And I kind of worked out my own style of playing.

I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper.

When I was in college, I was debating to try my hand at show business, or to become a professor. I just thought of the risk of not going into show business and always wondering if I would've had a chance. Because that's where my real heart was.

In my banjo show with the Steep Canyon Rangers, I do comedy during that show. It'd be absurd just to stand there mute and play 25 banjo songs.

I've run into people in my life who were so dramatic; people who are so extreme and so frustrating to be around that you end up thinking about them and talking about them for literally years after your experience with them is over. I've had that happen to me, and I've seen it happen to other people. I find it fascinating.

Nothing I do is done by popular demand.

I was not naturally talented. I didn't sing, dance or act, though working around that minor detail made me inventive.

Don't have sex man. It leads to kissing and pretty soon you have to start talking to them.

I don't think anyone is ever writing so that you can throw it away. You're always writing it to be something. Later, you decide whether it'll ever see the light of day. But at the moment of its writing, it's always meant to be something. So, to me, there's no practicing; there's only editing and publishing or not publishing.

Hosting the Oscars is much like making love to a woman. It's something I only get to do when Billy Crystal is out of town.

The banjo is truly an American instrument, and it captures something about our past.