Mel Brooks Quotes

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

As long as the world is turning and spinning, we're gonna be dizzy and we're gonna make mistakes.

I've been accused of vulgarity. I say that's bullshit.

If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator you never win.

The only thing we don't have a god for is premature ejaculation... but I hear that it's coming quickly.

Hope for the Best. Expect the worst. Life is a play. We're unrehearsed.

Life literally abounds in comedy if you just look around you.

If presidents can't do it to their wives, they do it to their country.

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

Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

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

If God wanted us to fly, He would have given us tickets.

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

Cat angels are the reason there are no mice angels.

Everything we do in life is based on fear, especially love.

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.

A cinema villain essentially needs a moustache so he can twiddle with it gleefully as he cooks up his next nasty plan.

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

Bad taste is simply saying the truth before it should be said.

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.

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.

You got to be brave. If you feel something, you've really got to risk it.

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

These men both publicly and privately have done so much for me. Without Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick I would be living in a little motel just around the corner here, trying to make ends meet.

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

He who hesitates is poor.

Rhetoric does not get you anywhere, because Hitler and Mussolini are just as good at rhetoric. But if you can bring these people down with comedy, they stand no chance.

If you're quiet, you're not living. You've got to be noisy and colorful and lively.

Well, just being stupid and politically incorrect doesn't work. You can be politically incorrect if you're smart.

Tragedy is what happens to me; comedy is what happens to you.

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

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.

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.

Now thyself is more important than “Know thyself.

Merchandising, merchandising, where the real money from the movie is made.

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.

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.

When I was a little kid, if somebody said they were thirty-five, I'd say "Oooh, they're going to die soon". But as I get older it doesn't mean a thing. You mustn't ever give in. Never give in to thinking you're old, because you're never old. Your mind, and I tell you this and listen to me carefully, your mind is never, ever old, it's eternally young.

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

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

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.

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.

Immortality is a by-product of good work.

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.

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.

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.

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

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