Top 70 Steve Carell Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Is it true that if you don’t USE it you LOSE it?”

— Steve Carell

2. “I’m not superstitious, but I’m a little stitious.”

— Steve Carell

3. “Your brain, like your tongue, is a muscle. Practicing thinking by yourself really helps develop your brain, which you need throughout your day. I like to practice my thinking in a darkened room, alone.”

— Steve Carell

4. “I think there’s a little bit of idiot in everybody and I think some people cover it better than others but I think I am very much a guy who wears his heart on his sleeve.”

— Steve Carell

5. “I’ve waited my entire life to be busy. Whenever I hear actors complain about being busy, I think, ‘shut up.’ Because you do, you wait to be successful or to be able to work.”

— Steve Carell

6. “I had, like, two goals in my career: One was to try to get into ‘Second City.’ When I moved to Chicago, my goal was to try to work at ‘Second City.’ And beyond that, my goal was to make enough money as an actor to not do anything else but act, not have to go and wait tables again.”

— Steve Carell

7. “I can get lazy. I don’t think I’m a very driven person. When I have work, I work very hard. But when I don’t work, I really don’t do anything. I could easily just fade away.”

— Steve Carell

8. “It’s harder when people are playing along, because it’s just not as funny. They’re trying to be funny, and it sort of cancels out the whole joke.”

— Steve Carell

9. “I’m not good with pickup lines or flirting. I don’t have that kind of self-confidence or natural charisma.”

— Steve Carell

10. “Maybe the coolest people are the ones who don’t care about being cool.”

— Steve Carell

11. “I wasn’t a class clown, I never developed this comedic flair as a kid. Even when I decided to become an actor, it was just to be an actor, not necessarily a comedic actor. I wasn’t that guy who struck out with women so he became really funny, and that’s when the women started to like him.”

— Steve Carell

12. “I find things funny that aren’t self-aware. That don’t know they’re funny, and I think the same can hold true for drama. If you think you’re in this tragedy and you play it for tragedy, there’s a self-awareness there that I think takes you out of watching it and I believe it cuts both ways.”

— Steve Carell

13. “Reading a book, watching a movie, going to a play, it’s transporting, and very, very exciting. And to be a part of that, creating things with your imagination, whoa.”

— Steve Carell

Featured in: Reading Quotes

14. “That’s an interesting way to put it: an expectation of who you should be. More often than not, it’s described as an expectation of who you are.”

— Steve Carell

15. “I don’t do anything to try to change people’s perceptions of me. I tend to think that’s sort of an ego driven thing.”

— Steve Carell

16. “As a parent, all you want is for your kids to be safe but you don’t want to be over-protective and so you know that at some stage, they’re going to make their own mistakes and get hurt emotionally when all you want to do is protect them from that.”

— Steve Carell

17. “I am always the type of person who is waiting for the other shoe to drop and for it to peter out and end. And if it does that’s fine.”

— Steve Carell

18. “We are all facing the end one day or another. I say, live a good and prosperous life, make sure your choices count, make them count.”

— Steve Carell

19. “Instead of telling our young people to plan ahead, we should tell them to plan to be surprised.”

— Steve Carell

20. “You’re doing your kids a disservice if they do get everything they want because that’s not the way life’s going to go, and I think kids have to have some reality.”

— Steve Carell

21. “For me, at least, all of my career goals, all of my focus, everything just shifted and the importance was my children, and that’s where all the joy came from as well.”

— Steve Carell

22. “My maternal grandma was a tough, tough lady and a stern woman, who lost her husband young and raised six kids by herself. She lived in a mining community in Upstate New York and ran a boarding house for miners. She took care of an entire family and miners who lived in the house as well.”

— Steve Carell

23. “You know, what’s funny to one person is not at all to someone else.”

— Steve Carell

24. “You’re so in love with your children that you’d do anything for them; that’s not necessarily the best thing.”

— Steve Carell

25. “Some people just derive great joy from making other people laugh. And I do, but I don’t feel like I need to do it 24 hours a day.”

— Steve Carell

26. “Taste in comedy, like fashion, changes all the time.”

— Steve Carell

27. “People just like to be on camera. There’s a huge desire to be in front of the camera, and once there, people will say and do almost anything. It’s sort of a drug, and I think people get addicted to it.”

— Steve Carell

28. “I think ultimately, when you believe somebody is going through a situation and it’s either awkward or ridiculous, but you believe it, that can be funny.”

— Steve Carell

29. “If I’d had a great level of success early on, who knows how I would have responded. I might have been a complete jerk.”

— Steve Carell

30. “Do not to be as shy around girls, because they’re probably just as shy and just as scared as you are.”

— Steve Carell

31. “Sending a handwritten letter is becoming such an anomaly. It’s disappearing. My mom is the only one who still writes me letters. And there’s something visceral about opening a letter – I see her on the page. I see her in her handwriting.”

— Steve Carell

32. “I play the baritone horn – which is like a mini tuba, and is the least sexy instrument you can choose, and I generally say I don’t play one so I don’t have to acknowledge it. I also play fife.”

— Steve Carell

33. “Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject. So you know you are getting the best possible information.”

— Steve Carell

34. “People say, ‘What’s the secret to a marriage?’ There’s no secret – I think you get lucky.”

— Steve Carell

35. “Divorce is fairly common these days, and I think many times people disregard the emotional impact that divorce has on a couple and a family, because it happens so frequently.”

— Steve Carell

36. “We always spend the summer together. My wife and kids, we always go back to Massachusetts and spend the summer there near where my wife and I both grew up. I wasn’t willing to sacrifice the summer to go elsewhere.”

— Steve Carell

37. “I’m listening to a lot of Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, and Rihanna. A lot of pop female artists. I have to say I’m pretty well-versed in the pop female category.”

— Steve Carell

38. “Relationships shouldn’t be disposable. If there’s something worth saving – not always the case, some relationships are irreconcilable – but if there is something that you determine is worth saving, then try to do that.”

— Steve Carell

39. “Like most people, I have painful memories of trying to fit in as a child. I wore, said, and did pretty much what everyone else did.”

— Steve Carell

40. “High school – those are your prime suffering years. They don’t get better suffering than that.”

— Steve Carell

41. “What kind of person would have a real craving for gummy worms?”

— Steve Carell

42. “I’ve thought a lot about success, because it’s very strange to me that I’ve been successful.”

— Steve Carell

43. “For my wife and I, the challenge is to not make every day the best day possible because it’s not realistic.”

— Steve Carell

44. “Different things just strike people differently. And it’s so subjective, too. Because what makes one person laugh won’t make others laugh. I guess it’s kind of checkerboarded.”

— Steve Carell

45. “I was a bad dater, and up until 8th grade I went to an all boy’s school. So, by the time I hit high school I was a bit freaked out by women in general.”

— Steve Carell

46. “Yeah, I went hunting once. Shot a deer in the leg. Had to kill it with a shovel. Took about an hour. Why do you ask?”

— Steve Carell

47. “In an enclosed space, a camel’s breath can change the atmosphere of the room. Not only just the smell, they literally seem to change the atmospheric pressure. It’s so disgusting. It’s like they have eight stomachs each more rancid then the next and it just comes out of their mouth.”

— Steve Carell

48. “Steve Buscemi is hilarious. He’s really, really good with improv.”

— Steve Carell

49. “It’s a very familiar type of place where people either go to their house on the lake or they get together in different places. This was a normal, relatable place that I think a lot of people have in their childhood.”

— Steve Carell

50. “There’s plenty of room for all sorts of movies and all sorts of comedies, so I never saw that as a competitive thing. I think there’s room in the marketplace for everything.”

— Steve Carell