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Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life QUOTES

Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life QUOTES

1 " Thankfully, persistence is a great substitute for talent. "

― Steve Martin , Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

2 " 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. "

― Steve Martin , Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

3 " Thankfully, perseverance is a great substitute for talent. "

― Steve Martin , Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

4 " I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a by-product. The course was more plodding than heroic: I did not strive valiantly against doubters but took incremental steps studded with a few intuitive leaps. "

― Steve Martin , Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

5 " ...teaching is, after all, a form of show business. "

― Steve Martin , Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

6 " Comedy is a distortion of what is happening, and there will always be something happening. "

― Steve Martin , Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

7 " Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration. "

― Steve Martin , Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

8 " I did stand-up comedy for 18 years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four years were spent in wild success. I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a byproduct. The course was more plodding than heroic. "

― Steve Martin , Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

9 " I have heard it said that a complicated childhood can lead to a life in the arts. I tell you this story of my father and me to let you know I am qualified to be a comedian. "

― Steve Martin , Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

10 " How many people have never raised their hand before? "

― Steve Martin , Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

11 " My most persistent memory of stand - up is of my mouth being in the present and my mind being in the future: the mouth speaking the line, the body delivering the gesture, while the mind looks back, observing, analyzing, judging, worrying, and then deciding when and what to say next. Enjoyment while performing was rare - enjoyment would have been an indulgent loss of focus that comedy cannot afford. "

― Steve Martin , Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

12 " I just believe that the interesting time in a career is pre-success, what shaped things, how did you get to this point? "

― Steve Martin , Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

13 " I opened the show with this line: "I have decided to give the greatest performance of my life! Oh, wait, sorry, that's tomorrow night. "

― Steve Martin , Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

14 " In my opening seconds, I would say, "It's great to be here," then move to several other spots on the stage and say, "No, it's great to be here!" I would move again: "No, it's great to be here! "

― Steve Martin , Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

15 " What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation. This type of laugh seemed stronger to me, as they would be laughing at something they chose, rather than being told exactly when to laugh. "

― Steve Martin , Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

16 " It was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking. These nights are accidental and statistical: Like lucky cards in poker, you can count on them occurring over time. What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the abominable circumstances. "

― Steve Martin , Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

17 " But my mother was aglow. She had a continuing fascination with celebrities, and now she had one of her own. She was never moved by what I was doing (in an interview she said, "He writes his own material, I’m always telling him he needs a new writer")… "

― Steve Martin , Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

18 " One day I was particularly gloomy, and Jim asked me what the matter was. I told him my high school girlfriend (for all of two weeks) had broken up with me. He said, “Oh, that’ll happen a lot.” The knowledge that this horrid grief was simply a part of life’s routine cheered me up almost instantly. "

― Steve Martin , Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

19 " In a sense, this book is not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know. Yes, these events are true, yet sometimes they seemed to have happened to someone else, and I often felt like a curious onlooker or someone trying to remember a dream. I ignored my stand-up career for twenty-five years, but now, having finished this memoir, I view this time with surprising warmth. One can have, it turns out, an affection for the war years. "

― Steve Martin , Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

20 " Doing comedy alone onstage is the ego's last stand. "

― Steve Martin , Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life