Anderson Hauptli's Key Ideas from Born Standing Up
by Steve Martin

"The comedian's slang for a successful show is "I murdered them," which I'm sure came about because you finally realize that the audience is capable of murdering you."

"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 death."

"I could not sing or dance, and the only acting I did was really just shouting. Thankfully perseverence is a great substitute for talent."

"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 have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspirations."

"Any new social philosophy is good for creativity."

"Teaching is, after all, a form of show business."

"I felt that a career in the irrational world of creativity not only made sense but had moral purpose."

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

"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." 

"The few hours I spent in the clubs and coffeehouses seemed like a full existence."

"Celebrities want fame when it's useful and don't when it's not. That argument is absolutely true."

"Movies were social; stand-up was antisocial."

"In psychoanalysis, you try to retain a discovery; in art, once the thing is made, you let it go."