A Quote by Steven Wright

When I was a kid, I went to the store and asked the guy, Do you have any toy train schedules? — © Steven Wright
When I was a kid, I went to the store and asked the guy, Do you have any toy train schedules?
Do you have any toy train schedules?
I was a kid in the third grade ... saw a dummy in the toy store. In the '60s and '70s there were a lot of those vinyl ventriloquism dummies - just about every toy store had one. Everyone close to my age that I've talked to, especially guys for some reason, tell me that they had one too, but they said they never could do it. So many people come up to me and say that. It was just something that I thought was cool. I started doing book reports with it - I developed the skill. I easily got A's on all my reports. It was just something that a little kid grasped on to - so I stuck with it.
When I was a kid, if I liked something from merchandising, I'd have to go to the toy store.
One of my friend's dad owned a grocery store, and one of the kids who worked at the grocery store was a wrestler. We got tickets to one of the shows, and then we stayed after, and they asked us if we wanted to get in there and train a little bit.
Every kid has a toy that they believe is their best friend, that they believe communicates with them, and they imagine it being alive, their toy horse or car or whatever it is. Stop-motion is the only medium where we literally can make a toy come to life, an actual object.
I always liked Darth Vader. I remember, when I was a kid, I went to the toy store for the Darth Vader pencil case. I took that to school for years.
Other kids would take their parents to the toy store and I'd take my mom to the record store.
I was always the new kid in school, I'm the kid from a broken family, I'm the kid who had no dad showing up at the father-son stuff, I'm the kid that was using food stamps at the grocery store.
If you're a comic book fan, you know that any epic book, you would open it up - as a kid, I would just go through and look at who was fighting who. I'd stand there in the store for 15 minutes until the guy told me to buy the book or get out.
Years ago, I was asked to come up to do a store signing in Vermont. The short version is the two younger guys who own the store pick me up at the airport and start driving me around Vermont, showing me the sights and the textile mills and the restaurants, and the punchline is there's no store. There is no store!
I worked in a health food store once. A guy asked me, 'If I melt dry ice, can I take a bath without getting wet?
When I was young, I would stay in my backyard and I would create roads and tunnels and systems. My uncle had a sawmill, and we had all sorts of pieces of wood, and we'd create a city. I truly believe that kids enjoy the box better than the car or the toy that's inside. So many times during Christmas, watching a kid, or even myself... There is excitement toward your toy, but then you put the toy on the side and something is created with the package.
For me, it's just acting. It's pretending. The best actors are children, and children don't do research. You never see a child going, 'I'm wondering about my motivation here. How can I do this toy? How can I do this train? I don't feel train.'
Turtles have always been my sigil, I suppose. When I was a kid, growing up in Bayonne, NJ, I lived in a federal housing project, and we were not allowed to have a dog or cats. The only pets I could have were turtles. So, I had an entire toy castle filled with dime-store turtles. I gave them all names, and since they were living in a toy castle, I decided they were all knights and kingsand I made up stories about how they killed each other and betrayed each other and fought for the kingdom. So, Game of Thrones, actually began with turtles. I decided later to recast it with actual human beings.
When I was a kid, I got caught shoplifting by a store security guard in Ellensburg. The next time I saw that store guard was when I got thrown in jail again - this time for not paying court fees. The guy happened to be in jail, too, right next to me. That's what Eastern Washington is like - you never get too far away from anybody.
I think of a film as being like a toy train.
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