A Quote by Steve Martin
After one of my plays came out, I had mixed reviews, some bad and some good. One day, it dawned on me. I thought, 'I wrote a play and he wrote a review, and that's the difference between him and me.'
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Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years.
We were on a tour, and there were some chord formations that were tough for me to play when I was a kid...it had become apparent that there was some stuff I wanted to do that [would require me] to learn how to do that. So I wrote the song and used some of these chord formations so I would have to play them. I thought it would be a great teaching vehicle for a while, and it was, but it ended up as a performance song.
I wrote a play before that and it never saw the light of day. And then I started working on this play and it came out really quickly. Eventually I got it, and I wrote a letter to Sarah Jessica Parker and she wanted to do it. So that's how it happened.
There is a big difference between No. 1 and No. 2. I don't care who wrote it. I'd love to one day have a No. 1 that I wrote, but if that ain't in the cards, whatever. My job is right now is to make the best music I can and try to get it to the people, whether it be something that I wrote or not. It's my job to be the best I can for the fans.
People see your reviews sometimes, and it's so good that they think I wrote it. And I'm like, "OK, yeah, I wrote it. And I own the company that put it out."
I did some writing for that movie. The remake of Planet of the Apes. I didn't write the script. But I wrote some lines that they ended up... not using. ... I wrote one line. I thought it would've been perfect. I don't know if anyone saw the movie. It's the scene where the ape general comes in. And they're trying to decide if they should attack right there, or wait until a little later. And I wrote: "Man these bananas are good!" But they didn't use it. I did all of that research.
In the immediate aftermath of the separation I just wrote and wrote and wrote. And wrote and wrote and wrote. Thank God I had that as an outlet.
He Wrote, Are you OK? I told him, My eyes are crummy. He wrote, But are you OK? I told him, That's a very complicated question. He wrote, That's a very simple answer. I asked, Are you OK? He wrote, Some mornings I wake up feeling grateful.
I wrote a few unsuccessful screenplays before I wrote 'Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.' I wrote them as television plays that never got made. I'm glad I wrote them - I think it was a good experience.
It was a roller-coaster process. For a long time I had no idea what I was doing. I wasn't writing with an outline. And, rare for me, I wrote scenes out of sequence. . . . I didn't understand the play when I wrote it. It was something I'd give in to. It happens to me periodically. I give over and write whatever comes to me and I don't know what it means and then I do. It's thrilling.
I remember the review from Michael Wilmington in Chicago, and Gene Siskel wrote really smart reviews where I thought, "Oh, they totally get what we're attempting to do."
It's more in retrospect as I've thought about it over the years and look back at what I wrote, how I wrote things - like there's a song that Ralph Stanley later recorded with me that he had guested on my record what was called "Travelers Lantern" that I wrote as basically, you know, a hymn.
I always wanted to be some kind of writer - I wrote plays and songs and "books" before I realized living and breathing people still wrote poems.
I didn't have the money to put myself through drama school, so I thought - naively - that if I wrote a play and put it on at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, agents would see me and that would be my ticket to Hollywood. I wrote a musical; an acting coach saw it and put me on his course for free while I wrote for his company.
Writers are funny about reviews: when they get a good one they ignore it-- but when they get a bad review they never forget it. Every writer I know is the same way: you get a hundred good reviews, and one bad, andyou remember only the bad. For years, you go on and fantasize about the reviewer who didn't like your book; you imagine him as a jerk, a wife-beater, a real ogre. And, in the meantime, the reviewer has forgotten all about the whole thing. But, twenty years later, the writer still remembers that one bad review.
I can't stay mad very long. I get grumpy when I read a bad review. I say, 'How could he say that about my music?' Then I forget about it. If I got mad every time somebody wrote something negative about me, I'd be exploding all the time. I'd be burned out just from reading reviews.
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