Mel Brooks famous quotes

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

#Psychics #Bullshit #Empowerment

I've always loved songwriting, and I vowed to be a songwriter like Cole Porter when I was only 9 years old.
-- Mel Brooks

#Years #Songwriting

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

#Expression #Bells #My Favorite

What ignited the rocket that sent you up into the vast regions of comedy, and why? I would say, for me, that philosophical treatise about having black beginnings and wanting love to compensate for that, wanting audiences and wanting attention - I say, "Au contraire." Completely opposite. I want the continuation of my mother's incredible love and attention to me.
-- Mel Brooks

#Mother #Philosophical #Opposites

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

#Love #Fear #Life Is

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

#Issues #Taste #Would Be

Life literally abounds in comedy if you just look around you.
-- Mel Brooks

#Laughter #Laughing #Looks

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

#Stupid #Army #Use

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

#Funny #Death #Suicide

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.
-- Mel Brooks

#Hurt #Love Is #Important

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

#Mustache #Needs #Cinema

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. But 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.
-- Mel Brooks

#Philosophy #Names #People

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

#Inspirational #Life #Play

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

#Emotional #Want #Rewards

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

#Admirer #Entertaining

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

#Thinking #Giving #People

Humor is just another defense against the universe.
-- Mel Brooks

#Inspirational #Laughter #Humor

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

#Appreciation #Moving #Fall

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

#Funny #Religion #Politics

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.
-- Mel Brooks

#Song #Giving #Musical

Everything starts with writing.
-- Mel Brooks

#Writing

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

#Mother #Four #Tables

My job is to go out and entertain the most people possible.
-- Mel Brooks

#Jobs #People

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

#Running #Horse #Winning

We rest our case on the production numbers.
-- Mel Brooks

#Numbers #Comedy #Cases

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

#Art #Together #Legs

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."
-- Mel Brooks

#Order #Waiting #Half

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

#Crazy #Would Be #Looks

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.
-- Mel Brooks

#Writing #Trying #Actors

You're always a little disappointing in person because you can't be the edited essence of yourself.
-- Mel Brooks

#Disappointment #Essence #Luck

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

#People #Trying #Use

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.
-- Mel Brooks

#People #Doe #Comedy

Creative people should always be striving, they should always be hungry, they should be looking for the next place to go.
-- Mel Brooks

#People #Creative #Next

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

#Country #Wife #President

The audience got jaded, they want a hit, they want a big success, and so you don't want to experiment because you say, well, I'll disappoint the audience, they may not like it, I better do something that I think is more commercial.
-- Mel Brooks

#Thinking #May #Want

Look, I don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive you've got to flap your arms and legs, you've got to jump around a lot, for life is the very opposite of death, and therefore you must at very least think noisy and colorfully, or you're not alive.
-- Mel Brooks

#Funny #Life #Witty

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

#Writing #Heart #Creative

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

#Inspiring #Funny Inspirational #Truth

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.
-- Mel Brooks

#Mean #Kids #Thinking

It's good to be the king.
-- Mel Brooks

#Kings

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.
-- Mel Brooks

#Believe #Giving #People

A lot of music is mathematics. It's balance.
-- Mel Brooks

#Balance #Mathematics #Music Is

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

#Brother #School #Ruins

Immortality is a by-product of good work.
-- Mel Brooks

#Immortality #Good Work

I like people with big talents and small neuroses - not always an easy combination to find. I've discovered that if the neurosis is too big, it diminishes the talent and you wind up working too hard for what you get.
-- Mel Brooks

#Wind #People #Neurosis

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.
-- Mel Brooks

#Character #Writing #Worry

I started with [Leo] Tolstoy and I was overwhelmed. Tolstoy writes like an ocean, in huge, rolling waves, and it doesn't look like it was processed through his thinking. It feels very natural. You don't question whether Tolstoy's right or wrong. His philosophy is housed in interrelating characters, so it's not up for grabs.
-- Mel Brooks

#Philosophy #Ocean #Character

You often hear that people go into show business to find the love they never had when they were children. Never believe it! Every comic and most of the actors I know had a childhood full of love. Then they grew up and found out that in the grown-up world, you don't get all that love, you just get your share. So they went into show business to recapture the love they had known as children when they were the center of the universe.
-- Mel Brooks

#Children #Believe #Love You

I wanted to entertain so badly that I kept at it until I was good. I just browbeat my way into show business.
-- Mel Brooks

#Way #Wanted #Show Business

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

#Kids #Boys #Adults

When I was a little kid at home, I thought the whole world was Jewish. For years I thought Roosevelt was Jewish. I loved him. I thought of him as my father. I'm always stunned when I find out that people like Roosevelt and Tolstoy weren't Jewish. How could I love them so much?
-- Mel Brooks

#Father #Kids #Home

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

#Eggs #Water #Brooklyn

I always thought it was great to be able to make people feel better. It was a little like being God.
-- Mel Brooks

#Feel Better #People #Able

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.
-- Mel Brooks

#Children #Kids #Eye

I make people laugh for a living. I believe I can say objectively that what I do I do as well as anybody. Just say I'm one of the best broken field runners that ever lived. For 35 years I was a cult hero, an underground funny.
-- Mel Brooks

#Believe #Hero #Years

You want me to admit I'm a four-foot, six-inch freckle-faced person of Jewish extraction? I admit it. All but the extraction. But being short never bothered me for three seconds. The rest of the time I wanted to commit suicide.
-- Mel Brooks

#Suicide #Feet #Four

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

#Eye #Laughing #Sense Of Humor

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

#Dream #Collaboration #Helping

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.
-- Mel Brooks

#Girl #Men #Years

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

#Morning #Sex #Kids

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.
-- Mel Brooks

#Real #Thinking #Water

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.
-- Mel Brooks

#Ideas #Vision #Want

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.
-- Mel Brooks

#Jobs #Thinking #Appreciate

I try to give my work everything I've got, because when you're dead or you're out of the business or you're in an old actors' home somewhere, if you've done a good job, your work will still be 16 years old and dancing and healthy and pirouetting and arabesquing all over the place. And they'll say, "That's who he is! He's not this decaying skeleton."
-- Mel Brooks

#Jobs #Home #Years

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

#Boys #Greatness #Men

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.
-- Mel Brooks

#Waiting #Legs #Rooms

Woody Allen is a genius. His films are wonderful. He's poetic, but he's also a critic. He artfully steps back from a social setting and criticizes it without - I suspect - without letting himself be vulnerable to it.
-- Mel Brooks

#Genius #Steps #Wonderful

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.
-- Mel Brooks

#Wall #Reality #Play

Making a movie is like making an ocean voyage, and the script is your ship.
-- Mel Brooks

#Ocean #Ships #Scripts

Now thyself is more important than “Know thyself.
-- Mel Brooks

#Important #Know Thyself #Thyself

Ill just say whats in my heart: Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump.
-- Mel Brooks

#Heart #Bumps #My Heart

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin....
-- Mel Brooks

#People #Skins #Humans

The only weapon I've got is comedy
-- Mel Brooks

#Weapons #Comedy

Sir, I have seen your film and it is vulgar! Madame, my film rises below vulgarity.
-- Mel Brooks

#Hollywood #Film #Vulgar

The egg cream is psychologically the opposite of circumcision--it pleasurably reaffirms your Jewishness.
-- Mel Brooks

#Eggs #Opposites #Circumcision

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.
-- Mel Brooks

#Crazy #Future #Dark

Good taste is the enemy of comedy.
-- Mel Brooks

#Inspirational #Enemy #Taste

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.
-- Mel Brooks

#Laughing #People #Feelings

We mock the things we are to be.
-- Mel Brooks

I knew it... I'm surrounded by assholes!
-- Mel Brooks

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

#Taste #Enough

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

#One Day #Rabbits #Lambs

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.
-- Mel Brooks

#Sex #Kids #Thinking

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

#Hate #Answers #Dollars

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.
-- Mel Brooks

#Running #Men #Italian

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

#Philosophy #Writing #Ideas

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

#Bridges #Infantry #Combat

Tragedy is what happens to me; comedy is what happens to you.
-- Mel Brooks

#Tragedy #Comedy

Not only should we laugh about Hitler. We must laugh about him. Especially in Berlin.
-- Mel Brooks

#Laughing #Berlin #Should

All short women have a delayed fuse. Marry a taller woman: My wife was an inch or two taller than me; it's a sign of security.
-- Mel Brooks

#Two #Wife #Inches

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

#Dream #Sex #Heaven

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

#Witty #Facts #My Favorite

I don't believe in this business of being behind, better to be in front.
-- Mel Brooks

#Believe #Progress

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

#Friday #Monday #Sunday

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.
-- Mel Brooks

#Running #Song #Elderly

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

#Stupid #Party #Nazi

That's it baby, if you've got it, flaunt it.
-- Mel Brooks

#Life #Baby

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

#Book #Character #Stories