Quotes & Jokes by Steve Martin / page 11

It was easier to sell a painting that was not for sale.

Hello, this is Harris. I'm in right now, so you can talk to me personally. Please start talking at the sound of the beep.

In talking to girls I could never remember the right sequence of things to say. I'd meet a girl and say, "Hi, was it good for you too?" If a girl spent the night, I'd wake up in the morning and then try to get her drunk.

We've taken what was just once a racetrack and made it a multifaceted gaming destination for the entire region.

That's a device. I like to think about it as a little bit of a mystery ... the director describes it as a statement of authorship. It's kind of a sophisticated concept, but I like to think of it almost as my character looking back intellectually, but not at an advanced age.

If you've got a dollar and you spend 29 cents on a loaf of bread, you've got 71 cents left; But if you've got seventeen grand and you spend 29 cents on a loaf of bread, you've still got seventeen grand. There's a math lesson for you.

It was essential that I never show doubt about what I was doing.

I just brush it off and try to make a joke about it. Over the years it's been interesting.

We are just happy that we are here in Brazil and that this was a good ending.

As a school board we felt it's an unfair expense to families. The lawsuit has a certain logic to it - if you have free public education, you can't put these things on top of it. It defeats the purpose.

I handed in a script last year and the studio didn't change one word. The word they didn't change was on page 87.

I wrote a novel this year called "Shop Girl", and several producers came to me and wanted to turn it into a movie. And I said, "If you think you`re going to take this book and change it around, and Hollywoodize it and change the ending... that`s going to cost you."

Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.

I would assign every lie a color: yellow when they were innocent, pale blue when they sailed over you like the sky, red because I knew they drew blood. And then there was the black lie. That's the worst of all. A black lie was when I told you the truth.

There's a point when you're famous and it's unbearable to go out because you're too famous. And there's a moment when you're famous just right.