Top 168 Quotes & Sayings by Mel Brooks - Page 2

Do you have a dollar on you? I hate to answer questions for nothing.

There's not enough bad taste! I LOVE bad taste! I live for bad taste! I am the spokesman for bad taste!

I knew it... I'm surrounded by assholes!

I was adored [as a kid]. I was always in the air, hurled up and kissed and thrown in the air again. Until I was six, my feet didn't touch the ground. "Look at those eyes! That nose! Those lips! That tooth! Get that child away from me, quick! I'll eat him!" Giving that up was very difficult later on in life.

Being short never bothered me for three seconds. The rest of the time I wanted to commit suicide.

I don't think in terms of results at all. I think: what next insanity can I shock the world with?

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.

Everything starts with writing.

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.

Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together.

I've been taught ever since I was a kid that sex is filthy and forbidden, and that's the way I think it should be. The filthier and more forbidden it is, the more exciting it is.

My God, I'd love to smash into the casket of Dostoyevsky, grab that bony hand and scream at the remains, 'Well done, you god-damn genius.'

I had low blood sugar, a chemical imbalance, plus the normal nervous breakdown everyone goes through from adolescence to adulthood.

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.

My liveliness is based on an incredible fear of death. In order to keep death at bay, I do a lot of "Yah! Yah! Yah!" And death says, "All right. He's too noisy and busy. I'll wait for someone who's sitting quietly, half asleep."

Comedy is lively, comedy is joy, and that's what keeps us [people] going, we've got to look forward to little, little happiness's. Little, little joys, and comedy is very, very important, it's a vital. We underestimate its value, but we should see more comedies. Comedy is life giving, it's invigorating. I really believe it.

I usually start with the words. The rhythm of the words gives me the rhythm of the song, and then I look for the musical highlights in it to carry it.

I have been lucky that some critics joined the mob in loving something I've done, or in appreciating it. I've been lucky. But most of the critics don't like what the people like. I think they have a very strange job, and they are meant to criticize.

In real life people fart, in the movies, people don't. Why not? Farts are a repressed minority. The mouth gets to say all kinds of things, but the other place is supposed to keep quiet. But maybe our lower colons have something interesting to say. Maybe we should listen to them. Farts are human, more human than a lot of people I know. I think we should bring them out of the water closet and into the parlor.

With the birth of the artist came the inevitable afterbirth... the critic

The final test of fame is to have a crazy person imagine he is you.

I don't know what to say so I'll just say what's in my heart...badoom, badoom, badoom.

You cannot have fun with anything that you don't love or admire or respect.

Basically, I'm a writer. I'm the proprietor of the vision. I alone know what I eventually want to happen on the screen. So if you have a valuable idea, the only way to protect it is to direct it.

If you're alive, make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death.

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.

Don’t be stupid, be a smarty / Come and join the Nazi Party!

I love spaghetti and sex, sometimes together. My dream of heaven is walking naked through fields of pasta fazool.

When we got to our hotel rooms, mosquitoes as big as George Foreman were waiting for us. They were sitting in armchairs with their legs crossed.

My mother is very short - four-eleven. She could walk under tables and never hit her head.

The Twelve Chairs is about the same thing. It's all about money or love. We know we need money, we know we have to get money, we know we have to hurt others to get money. But we don't know until maybe it's a little too late in life that love is the most important thing. Love, friendship, affection, bonhomie, whatever. Those are the only things that really count: to love and be loved.

Let's have a merry journey, and shout about how light is good and dark is not. What we should do is not future ourselves so much. We should now ourselves. "Now thyself" is more important than "know thyself." Reason is what tells us to ignore the present and live in the future. So all we do is make plans. We think that somewhere there are going to be green pastures. It's crazy. Heaven is nothing but a grand, monumental instance of future. Listen, now is good. Now is wonderful.

My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives.

The audience. They see the name Mel Brooks, they want something really funny. They don't want to be moved; they don't want to be taught any lessons. [...] I get more letters for ?Twelve Chairs ?and ?Life Stinks? than I get from any other movies, because people actually agree with the philosophy, or were moved, or they love the movie.

Now thyself is more important than “Know thyself.

Good taste is the enemy of comedy.

One day, God said 'Let there be prey.' And he created pigeons, rabbits, lambs and Gene Wilder.

It would be hypocritical of me to take issue with anything in questionable taste, seeing that I invented bad taste in films.

Usually when a lot of men get together, it's called a war.

You're young forever when you write. Alfred Hitchcock directed until the day he died. As long as you don't have any dementia or Alzheimer's, if you have your All-Bran every day and clear yourself out, I think your brains are gonna be all right.

Be interested in everything. You don't have to adore it. I don't adore hip-hop, I don't think it's great music, but I'm interested, I listen. I watch a lot of new films, I see everything. I still read, I like books, whether they are old books, new books. I'm interested - you gotta stay interested!

Comedy is serious - deadly serious. Never, never try to be funny! The actors must be serious. Only the situation must be absurd. Funny is in the writing, not in the performing. If the situation isn't absurd, no amount of joke will help.

The more serious the situation, the funnier the comedy can be. The greatest comedy plays against the greatest tragedy. Comedy is a red rubber ball and if you throw it against a soft, funny wall, it will not come back. But if you throw it against the hard wall of ultimate reality, it will bounce back and be very lively. Very, very few people understand this.

Why should I waste my good time making a straight dramatic film? The people who can't make you laugh can do that.

Cat angels are the reason there are no mice angels.

I'm always stunned when I find out people like Roosevelt and Tolstoy weren't Jewish. How could I love them so much?

When I'm writing a script, I don't worry about plot as much as I do about people. I get to know the main characters - what they need, what they want, what they should do. That's what gets the story going. You can't just have action, you've got to find out what the characters want. And then they must grow, they must go somewhere.

Humor keeps the elderly rolling along, singing a song. When you laugh, its an involuntary explosion of the lungs. The lungs need to replenish themselves with oxygen. So you laugh, you breathe, the blood runs, and everything is circulating. If you dont laugh, youll die.

I was born on the kitchen table. We were so poor my mother couldn't afford to have me; the lady next door gave birth to me.

THE 2,000-YEAR-OLD MAN'S SECRETS OF LONGEVITY 1. Don't run for a bus - there'll always be another. 2. Never, ever touch fried food. 3. Stay out of a Ferrari or any other small Italian car. 4. Eat fruit - a nectarine - even a rotten plum is good.

Feeling different, feeling alienated, feeling persecuted, feeling that the only way to deal with the world is to laugh - because if you don't laugh you're going to cry and never stop crying - that's probably what's responsible for the Jews having developed such a great sense of humor. The people who had the greatest reason to weep, learned more than anyone else how to laugh.

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.

My favorite expression is: When you go up to the bell, ring it ? or don't go up to the bell.

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.

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.

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.

It's good to be the king.

Jewish women are very exciting, as exciting sexually as any other group. Even so, my advice to a young man marrying a Jewish girl would be to have three and a half years of foreplay. Of course, most girls in every group are reserved about getting down to it. They don't usually do it right away. But once they do it, women are bananas. They don't wanna do it, you can't make them do it, there's no way they'll do it - but once they do it, they don't let you alone.

The only weapon I've got is comedy

I love gentiles. In fact, on of my favorite activities is Protestant spotting.