Mel Brooks quotes:

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.

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

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.

Well, you know, 'Spaceballs' is a weird combination, because it's a simple, sweet little fairytale, and it's crazy and out-there and making fun of and taking apart sci-fi, 'Star Wars', and 'Star Trek'.

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.

When you come to Germany as a Jew you have an uneasy feeling, but I've always felt okay in Berlin.

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

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.

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

Immortality is a by-product of good work.

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

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

I only direct in self-defense.

I loved Westerns as a little kid, and I loved horror films.

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

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

If Shaw and Einstein couldn't beat death, what chance have I got? Practically none.

I'm rather secular. I'm basically Jewish. But I think I'm Jewish not because of the Jewish religion at all.

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.'

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

I'll accept bad taste in a minute, as long as there's some great comedy minds and performances.

I love writing songs. I'm a songwriter.

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

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.

Dom DeLuise was a big man in every way. He was big in size and created big laughter and joy.

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

You want to be as smart as you can about being stupid.

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.

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

We want to get people laughing; we don't want to offend anybody.

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.

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.

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.

I was out in the combat engineers. We would throw up bridges in advance of the infantry but mainly we would just throw up.

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.

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.

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.

I'm married to a beautiful and talented woman who can lift your spirits just by looking at you.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

In every spoof I make real love to the things I am spoofing.

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.

I only direct in self-defense

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.

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.

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

Some critics are emotionally desiccated, personally about as attractive as a year-old peach in a single girl's refrigerator.

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."

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

There's an army story in me, and I think there's a WWII Brooks film somewhere.

I was a soldier in WWII. The last couple of months of the war I was actually in combat.

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

But I have bad taste with a deep fount of intellectuality.

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

I wish I was better looking.

I like Chris Rock. He's dangerous.

As far as songwriters, I've always been a fan of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and George Gershwin; those guys mean a lot to me.

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.

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.

He who hesitates is poor.

A lot of music is mathematics. It's balance.

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.

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!"

Anybody can direct, but there are only eleven good writers.

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.

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!

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!

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

Cat angels are the reason there are no mice angels.

Coleman Jacoby and Arnie Rosen won an Emmy and Mel Brooks didn't! Niezsche was right! There is no God! There is no God!

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Everything starts with writing.

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.

Good taste is the enemy of comedy.

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

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 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.

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

I don't have a mission. I don't have a torch to burn.

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

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

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

I have always been a huge admirer of my own work. I'm one of the funniest and most entertaining writers I know.

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.

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

I know how to make it a great musical. I've got to. It's like I've got to see it on stage.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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."

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

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 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.

I was in the army, and to me it was like a newsreel.

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.

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

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

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

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

Immortality is a by-product of good work. Masterpieces are not for artists, they're for critics. Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together. My message to the world is 'Let's swing, sing, shout, make noise! Let's not mimic death before our time comes! Let's be wet and noisy!'

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.

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

It's good to be the king.

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

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.

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.