Top 100 Quotes About Mel Brooks
#1. Preston Sturges is one of my favorites. I learned about dialogue and timing from him - louder, faster, funnier. But I do love Mel Brooks.
Clara Mamet
#2. My dad had a commercial film company, so he had a videotape player before anyone. So he got Mel Brooks movies or Citizen Kane or some classic old movies. And every summer the revival house in Evanston would show the great films from the '50s and '60s and '70s.
John Cusack
#3. I mean I would still love to be in Mel Brooks' movies; he's great.
Armie Hammer
#4. Mel Brooks was a young fan at the time: 'Eddie Cantor was very important to me. Very influential on my work. The sketches were fast and furious - and Cantor was great at supporting the other guy in the sketch. It was Cantor who was making it all work for me.
Kliph Nesteroff
#5. The three theater peeps I would love to dine with are Mel Brooks, because he is so funny; Stephen Sondheim, because he is a god-like genius; and Ethel Merman, to compare notes on fabulous belting.
Nancy Allen
#6. Ill give you an idea of how Jewish Mel Brooks is: Thats a nose job.
Martin Short
#7. I remember seeing Airplane, and even Mel Brooks movies like History of the World Part I, and just really loving that style of movies that make fun of movies. I think it needs to be done. All of these movies are ripe for being poked at.
Ashley Tisdale
#8. And I love Mel Brooks. My Dad loved his movies, too, they're awesome, the kind of thing that if you're in for ten minutes, you're in for two hours.
Mike Myers
#9. We pay homage to the people who came before, doing satires, like Mel Brooks; we're just carrying the torch.
Shawn Wayans
#10. No doubt there are people who are our guests [ in Oh, Hello] who are more famous, but to me, Mel Brooks is the most famous person. So that was really cool.
Nick Kroll
#11. I first got involved with Mel Brooks through 'The Elephant Man.' Everybody knows now, but they didn't know at the time that he was the producer.
John Hurt
#12. The person who should really write an appreciation of the late great Dom DeLuise is Burt Reynolds, who, even more than Mel Brooks, made of the jolly, beanie wearing fat man a side-kick and a legend.
Rich Cohen
#13. Id like to acknowledge three people who early on knew Mel Brooks was one of the funniest people in the world: Sid Caesar, me, and Mel Brooks.
Carl Reiner
#14. I also try to surround myself with people I love - make a family out of the company. So I tend to use the same people over and over. There's a sort of Mel Brooks Repertory Company.
Mel Brooks
#15. 'The Dictator' lands somewhere between wan Mel Brooks and good Adam Sandler, whose 'You Don't Mess With the Zohan,' about an Israeli Special Forces soldier at a hair salon, manages to strike better contrasts with vaguely similar culture differences - it's a nuttier movie, too.
Wesley Morris
#16. My movies were not reaping the kind of emotional rewards that I wanted. I wanted them to be appreciated and they weren't. I didn't want the reviews to say, "Mel Brooks has made another movie," and you get the title somewhere in the second paragraph.
Mel Brooks
#17. I got a chance to work with Mel Brooks on two of his films: Silent Movie and High Anxiety.
Barry Levinson
#18. Apparently nobody really read it, it was a cheap movie, it fit their schedule in terms of things so fine, let the guy make that high school comedy. I used to work with Mel Brooks so they figured oh it's going to be one of those really silly movies and that's how it got made.
Barry Levinson
#19. Coleman Jacoby and Arnie Rosen won an Emmy and Mel Brooks didn't! Niezsche was right! There is no God! There is no God!
Mel Brooks
#20. They wanted me to play third like Brooks so I did play like Brooks - Mel Brooks.
Andy Van Slyke
#21. I'm a working-class former apprentice electrician; at the age of 14, if you'd told me I would one day be standing on a stage with Mel Brooks, I'd have thought you were off your head. But these things can happen.
John Gordon Sinclair
#22. My job is to go out and entertain the most people possible.
Mel Brooks
#23. Ill just say whats in my heart: Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump.
Mel Brooks
#24. Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.
Mel Brooks
#25. Now thyself is more important than Know thyself.
Mel Brooks
#26. I don't have a mission. I don't have a torch to burn.
Mel Brooks
#27. Everything we do in life is based on fear, especially love.
Mel Brooks
#28. Usually when a lot of men get together, it's called a war.
Mel Brooks
#29. I knew it ... I'm surrounded by assholes!
Mel Brooks
#30. The egg cream is psychologically the opposite of circumcision
it pleasurably reaffirms your Jewishness.
Mel Brooks
#31. I don't know what to say so I'll just say what's in my heart ... badoom, badoom, badoom.
Mel Brooks
#32. My brothers went to work at 12 and put themselves through school and brought the family out of ruin into food and clothing.
Mel Brooks
#33. The only weapon I've got is comedy
Mel Brooks
#34. Bad taste is simply saying the truth before it should be said.
Mel Brooks
#35. With the birth of the artist came the inevitable afterbirth ... the critic
Mel Brooks
#36. I was out in the combat engineers. We would throw up bridges in advance of the infantry but mainly we would just throw up.
Mel Brooks
#37. No creative writer knows what is commercial and what isn't. You just write from your heart, you write from the deepest, creative urges in you, and you write from your soul, and you just either get lucky or not.
Mel Brooks
#38. Tragedy is when I stub my toe. Comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die.
Mel Brooks
#39. They make us live in the crap, and now they're taking the crap away? No!
Mel Brooks
#40. American sex is generally straight. It happens at 11 o'clock Saturday night. In the rural areas, it happens at nine and it happens pretty fast. Got to get up the next morning, especially if there're kids. Can't make noise, either, wake the kids.
Mel Brooks
#41. I don't think in terms of results at all. I think: what next insanity can I shock the world with?
Mel Brooks
#42. Don't be stupid, be a smarty / Come and join the Nazi Party!
Mel Brooks
#43. The thing is to be brave and move the audience with you, instead of cater to the lowest common denominator, you know, slipping on a banana peel and falling on your ass. You got to move the audience a little further ahead in terms of their appreciation of what is comedy. It's complicated.
Mel Brooks
#44. All right, I am often brash, rude and brutally direct. Someday I'm going to die and I don't have time to toe-dance around the periphery of hatred.
Mel Brooks
#45. There's no such thing as too far. If it works it's funny, if it doesn't work it's too far, it's stupid. Really there's no such thing as "too far." You're joining the politically correct when you use words like "too far." You don't want to join the army of politically correct.
Mel Brooks
#46. When you get big special effects pictures, sci-fi and things, there's little or no comedy. Or it's a domestic comedy and there's not one special effect. But very rarely do these things fuse and come out right.
Mel Brooks
#47. My mother is very short - four-eleven. She could walk under tables and never hit her head.
Mel Brooks
#48. I'm still a horse that can run. I may not be able to win the Derby, but what do you do when you retire? People retire and they vegetate. They go away and they dry up.
Mel Brooks
#49. Immortality is a by-product of good work.
Mel Brooks
#50. If you're alive, make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death.
Mel Brooks
#51. Never retire! Do what you do and keep doing it. But don't do it on Friday. Take Friday off. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, go fishing ... Then Monday to Thursday, do what you've been doing all your life. My point is: Live full and don't retreat.
Mel Brooks
#52. Tolstoy was the most gifted writer who ever lived. It's like he stuck a pen in his heart and it didn't even go through his mind on its way to the page.
Mel Brooks
#53. Being short never bothered me for three seconds. The rest of the time I wanted to commit suicide.
Mel Brooks
#54. Humor is just another defense against the
universe.
Mel Brooks
#55. We want to get people laughing; we don't want to offend anybody.
Mel Brooks
#56. Not only should we laugh about Hitler. We must laugh about him. Especially in Berlin.
Mel Brooks
#57. Being brave is being scared and worried and still doing it [what you do]. Because if you're just a wacko, a mashugana, a crazy guy, then you're not brave, your nuts!
Mel Brooks
#58. A brushstroke of vanity is good to add into the mix, to balance your timidity. We're all blessed with a lot of timidity and a lot of worry and anxiety, and vanity is a good antidote.
Mel Brooks
#59. We rest our case on the production numbers.
Mel Brooks
#60. If you're quiet, you're not living. You've got to be noisy and colorful and lively.
Mel Brooks
#61. I have always been a huge admirer of my own work. I'm one of the funniest and most entertaining writers I know.
Mel Brooks
#62. Well, just being stupid and politically incorrect doesn't work. You can be politically incorrect if you're smart.
Mel Brooks
#63. I was a soldier in WWII. The last couple of months of the war I was actually in combat.
Mel Brooks
#64. If Ivan the Terrible had been kissed and loved between zero and three, he probably would have become Ivan Not So Terrible. If you're Jewish, you have a small smile on your face. Because you know the rest are wrong and you don't want to hurt their feelings.
Mel Brooks
#65. A lot of music is mathematics. It's balance.
Mel Brooks
#66. Oh, I'm not a true genius. I'm a near genius. I would say I'm a short genius. I'd rather be tall and normal than a short genius.
Mel Brooks
#67. The only thing we don't have a god for is premature ejaculation ... but I hear that it's coming quickly.
Mel Brooks
#68. You got to be brave. If you feel something, you've really got to risk it.
Mel Brooks
#69. I'm always stunned when I find out people like Roosevelt and Tolstoy weren't Jewish. How could I love them so much?
Mel Brooks
#70. Comedy is protest. It's "I beg to differ," if you're fancy, or if you're Jewish, "Hey, listen to this!
Mel Brooks
#71. There's a lot of things that I've done to stick into the box set. You never have it this good. I think people should bargain. They shouldn't just buy the set, it's a little expensive [anyway]. But they should say - I'll give them dialogue, I'm a good writer.
Mel Brooks
#72. Creative people should always be striving, they should always be hungry, they should be looking for the next place to go.
Mel Brooks
#73. You cannot have fun with anything that you don't love or admire or respect.
Mel Brooks
#74. An egg cream can do anything. An egg cream to a Brooklyn Jew is like water to an Arab. A Jew will kill for an egg cream. It's the Jewish malmsey.
Mel Brooks
#75. The brilliance of Max Brooks is that he always quotes authorities at the back of his books that never existed. Like a Russian professor he made up that validates a story or character.
Mel Brooks
#76. Anybody can direct, but there are only eleven good writers.
Mel Brooks
#77. I'm married to a beautiful and talented woman who can lift your spirits just by looking at you.
Mel Brooks
#78. You want to be as smart as you can about being stupid.
Mel Brooks
#79. I love [Nikolai] Gogol's great eye for idiot behavior. Gogol said that life is so tragic, so stupendously sad that we'd better laugh a lot and enjoy ourselves. You either get a sense of humor going or you go under.
Mel Brooks
#80. Do you have a dollar on you? I hate to answer questions for nothing.
Mel Brooks
#81. I realised that all one really had to do was just observe. Observe and slightly exaggerate, and you had comedy. Instead of creating a mythical premise for a stupid joke, I found playing off truth got the best result.
Mel Brooks
#82. Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So for every ten Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast-beaters. By the time I was five I knew I was that one.
Mel Brooks
#83. The final test of fame is to have a crazy person imagine he is you.
Mel Brooks
#84. I love writing songs. I'm a songwriter.
Mel Brooks
#85. My favorite expression is: When you go up to the bell, ring it ? or don't go up to the bell.
Mel Brooks
#86. I don't believe in this business of being behind, better to be in front.
Mel Brooks
#87. Directing is a terrible, anxious process. It's all collaboration, and if you have a dream, it's diluted very quickly by the slightest ineptness in any of your collaborators. They're supposed to help you, but too often they help you into your grave.
Mel Brooks
#88. It's talent. Either you got it or you ain't.
Mel Brooks
#89. Nothing is free. You got to pay to be in society. First you start with homework.
Mel Brooks
#90. If Shaw and Einstein couldn't beat death, what chance have I got? Practically none.
Mel Brooks
#91. As long as the world is turning and spinning, we're gonna be dizzy and we're gonna make mistakes.
Mel Brooks
#92. I've been accused of vulgarity. I say that's bullshit.
Mel Brooks
#93. Any man's greatness is a tribute to the nobility of all mankind, so when we celebrate the genius of [Leo] Tolstoy, we say, "Look! One of our boys made it! Look what we're capable of!"
Mel Brooks
#94. If God wanted us to fly, He would have given us tickets.
Mel Brooks
#95. I love spaghetti and sex, sometimes together. My dream of heaven is walking naked through fields of pasta fazool.
Mel Brooks
#97. Everything starts with writing. And then to support your vision, your ideas, your philosophy, your jokes, whatever, you've gotta perform them and/or direct them, or sometimes just produce them.
Mel Brooks
#98. My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives.
Mel Brooks
#99. When I was a little boy, I thought when I grew up I would talk Yiddish. I thought little kids talked English, but when they became adults, they would talk Yiddish like the adults did. There would be no reason to talk English anymore, because we would have made it.
Mel Brooks
#100. A cinema villain essentially needs a moustache so he can twiddle with it gleefully as he cooks up his next nasty plan.
Mel Brooks
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