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Had his room been facing west he would have noted the sparkling twenty-five-mile vista to the sea which looks almost like the Mediterranean. He would have noted how the streets of L.A. undulate over short hills as though a finger is poking the landscape from underneath. How laid over this crosshatch are streets meandering on the diagonal creating a multitude of ways to get from one place to another by traveling along the hypotenuse. These a..
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Steve Martin |
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5c80cdb
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At least Clarissa knows I'm benign. But that is not an adjective one wants to throw around about one's spouse: "This is my husband. He's benign."
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Steve Martin |
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87adf5f
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In the deeper hours of the night I began to look at myself, to consider myself and my condition, to measure the life I'd led so far. I did not know what made me this way. I did not know of any other way I could be. I did not know what was inside me or how I could redeem what was hidden there. There must be a key or person or thing, or song or poem or belief, or old saw that could access it, but they all seemed so far away, and after I drift..
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Steve Martin |
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2971353
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Mirabelle, who never takes credit for her attractiveness, believes it is not she he is responding to, but rather something independent of her.
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Steve Martin |
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3cf2a1b
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The dawn breaks everything, including the mood from the night before.
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Steve Martin |
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d0fdd69
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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."
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Steve Martin |
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2459001
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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 ..
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Steve Martin |
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926e228
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Doing comedy alone onstage is the ego's last stand.
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Steve Martin |
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Mirabelle knows, and she lets this be unspoken, that all free things require conversation. Sitting in a darkened movie theatre requires absolutely no conversation at all, whereas a free date, like a walk down Hollywood Boulevard in the busy evening, requires comments, chatter, observations, and with luck, wit. She worries that since they have only exchanged perhaps two dozen words between them, these free dates will be horrible.
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Steve Martin |
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c157f38
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No, no, I could never be a woman. I'd just stay at home and play with my breasts all day.
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Steve Martin |
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She appears sunny, a quality that Mirabelle can call upon only for special occasions.
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Steve Martin |
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There is nothing too mysterious about Ray Porter, at least not in the usual sense of the word. He is single, he is kind, he tries to do the right thing, and he does not understand himself, or women, or his relationships with women.
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Steve Martin |
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1b771db
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And after his unparsable response, including a passage where he said he was 'blurring the boundaries between a thing and thought,' she said, 'Thank you, I get lost sometimes,' while laying two fingers on his folded arm.
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hilarious
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Steve Martin |
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1d3ba8f
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Enjoyment while performing was rare--enjoyment would have been an indulgent loss of focus that comedy cannot afford. After the shows, however, I experienced long hours of elation or misery depending on how the show went, because doing comedy alone onstage is the ego's last stand.
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Steve Martin |
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6e51ce4
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pinching my swollen fingers in between. Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naivete, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.
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Steve Martin |
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fcb5434
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Dogs in My Nose -- When I woke up that morning, it didn't take me long to realize there were dogs in my nose. I could hear their muffled barks; I could feel their playful vibrations.
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Steve Martin |
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b6e6386
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Bohemians. These Bohemians, Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Williams, and their seven children, Biff, Tina, Sparky, Louise, Tuffy, Mickey, and Biff Number Two, lived in a notorious artist's colony and planned community. Naturally, the bohemian's existence thrived on creativity. Early in the morning, Mrs. Williams would rise and create breakfast. Then, Mr. Williams, inspired by his wife's limitless energy, would rush off to a special room and create..
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Steve Martin |
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0e91139
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You're nuts, but you're welcome here.
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Steve Martin |
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e0de896
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MY FATHER , GLENN VERNON MARTIN , died in 1997 at age eighty-three, and afterward his friends told me how much they had loved him. They told me how enjoyable he was, how outgoing he was, how funny and caring he was. I was surprised by these descriptions, because the number of funny or caring words that had passed between my father and me was few. He had evidently saved his vibrant personality for use outside the family. When I was seven or ..
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Steve Martin |
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Be courteous, kind, and forgiving. Be gentle and peaceful each day. Be warm and human and grateful. Be thoughtful and trustful and childlike, Be witty and happy and wise. Be honest and love all your neighbors. Be obsequious, purple, and clairvoyant. Be pompous, obese, and eat cactus. Be dull and boring and omnipresent. Criticize things that you don't know about. Be oblong and have your knees removed. Be sure to stop at stop signs,..
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Steve Martin- Born Standing Up |
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Femme Fatale: Haven't I seen you somewhere before?
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Steve Martin - "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid" |
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In logic class, I opened my textbook--the last place I was expecting to find comic inspiration--and was startled to find that Lewis Carroll, the supremely witty author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, was also a logician. He wrote logic textbooks and included argument forms based on the syllogism, normally presented in logic books this way: All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. _________________________________ Therefore, Socrates is m..
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Steve Martin |
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60305ab
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Sure, I've gotten some disbelieving stares when I've tried to explain this little habit of mine to, say, a bus seatmate. I've watched a guy adjust his posture, or get up and move back several rows, even if it meant he now sat next to someone else who was clearly on the verge of some other kind of insanity.
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Steve Martin |
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All this in no way discounts her attractiveness. Mirabelle is attractive; it's just that she is never the first or second girl chosen.
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Steve Martin |
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72d52c8
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Mirabelle's ambition is about one-tenth of 1 percent of what would be called normal. ... She is not aware that some people fight like alley cats for desirable situations. She presents a resume, fills out an application, waits, and finally makes a call to see if she got the job. Usually, a confused secretary will answer and say that the position had been filled weeks ago. This aimlessness in presenting herself contributes to her feeling of b..
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Steve Martin |
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These experiences have caused him to think very hard about what he is doing and where he is going. And the result of all this thinking is that he now understands that he doesn't know what he is doing or where he is going.
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Steve Martin |
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What would any man do with a soggy girl who can't assert herself, who has a weak voice, and whose main personality component is helplessness?
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Steve Martin |
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6fd9e07
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My plan was to walk by on my side of the street and not look over her way. This, I felt, was a very clever masculine move: to meet and ultimately seduce through no contact at all. She would be made aware of me as a mysterious figure, someone with no need of her whatsoever. This is compelling to a woman.
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Steve Martin |
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I see other people crossing the street at the curb and I don't know how they can do it.
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Steve Martin |
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When you work in the glove department at Neiman's, you are selling things that nobody buys anymore.
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Steve Martin |
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She has simply never quite learned to walk or hold herself comfortably, which makes her come off as an attractive wallflower.
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Steve Martin |
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If there were a silent observer, Mirabelle would be seen as a carefree, happy girl who is preparing for a night on the town. But in reality, these activities are the physical manifestations of her stillness.
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Steve Martin |
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1fb3317
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Clarissa habla conmigo durante exactamente cuarenta y cinco minutos, pero no es psiquiatra cualificada; es estudiante de psiquiatria. De modo que oficialmente es una visitante que tiene los ojos verdes..." "Si estaba en una mision de recopilacion de datos o coqueteaba conmigo, no habria sabido decirlo. Pero que supiera que farmacos corrian por mis privadas venas era algo profundamente intimo." "Hay una tradicion solemne en torno a lo clande..
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Steve Martin |
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272ea98
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Now that I had assigned myself an act without jokes, I gave myself a rule. Never let them know I was bombing
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steve-martin
stand-up
jokes
comedy
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Steve Martin |
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a54a6bf
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Both scary and down-to-earth, he [John Belushi] once told me, 'I never yell at the staff, only the department heads'.
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down-to-earth
john-belushi
saturday-night-live
snl
steve-martin
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Steve Martin |
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c38d9fb
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I might not seem like the type who could sit at an outdoor cafe drinking a latte, but I am. Why? No motion required. It's just sitting. Sitting and sipping. I can't imagine a neurosis that would prevent one from raising one's arm to one's mouth while holding a cup, though given time, I'm sure I could come up with one.
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Steve Martin |
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a6aa2af
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When I moved out of the house at eighteen, I rarely called home to check up on my parents or tell them how I was doing. Why? The answer shocks me as I write it: I didn't know I was supposed to.
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Steve Martin |
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8c3a6ab
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These word games bothered and intrigued me. Appearing to be silly nonsense, on examination they were absolutely logical--yet they were still funny. The comedy doors opened wide, and Lewis Carroll's clever fancies from the nineteenth century expanded my notion of what comedy could be. I began closing my show by announcing, "I'm not going home tonight; I'm going to Bananaland, a place where only two things are true, only two things: One, all ..
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Steve Martin |
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9ef93ca
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Everything was dragging me toward the arts; even the study of modern philosophy suggested that philosophy was nonsense.
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philosophy
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Steve Martin |
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ea0b0fe
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A luxury item is a thing you have that annoys other people that you have it.
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Steve Martin |
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0fe3181
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I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years.
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opening-lines
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Steve Martin |
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aed5799
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Mirabelle is not affected by a man's failure to approach her, as her own self-deprecating attitude never allows the idea that he would in the first place.
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Steve Martin |
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a real scholar with a bright pen,
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Steve Martin |
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5b9cbc6
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Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration. AT
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Steve Martin |