Albert Brooks Quotes - Page 4

Steven Spielberg seems to have wanted to be a director from 13. He put his dog in a certain position and made him eat at four o'clock. He liked to direct it. But, to me, directing is tedious. Especially if you're acting in it. And I'm inherently lazy.

The whole world is tense. Everybody gets the international news. Theres been no American comedy at all that even remotely addresses the subject in any way. My goal isnt to solve the worlds problems. My character wasnt even able to do his assignment. But the premise of wanting to find out about somebody -- other than the stuff that the CIA will tell you -- theres no hope unless we do that.

I've always been the king of silence. I've always been a minimalist comedian. I've taken my influence from Jack Benny, who was the king of that I've always done 'less is more.'

I, sort of, got into comedy accidentally, and it got bigger than I wanted it to.

I've always been in the middle of making my own movies, so taking acting jobs that take me away from that has been impossible.

I'd still like to see 'Survivor' minus the planned show-biz parts. That would be the purest form of show business - I want to see someone so hungry that they eat somebody else's foot.

What's interesting about books that take place in the future, even twenty years in the future, is that many of them are black or white: It's either a utopia or it's misery. The real truth is that there's going to be both things in any future, just like there is now.

Twitter, to me, works if you're funny. Twitter doesn't work as a promotional tool unless you do it very, very, very occasionally.

Well, you know, with every character, if you're going to expose yourself, you've got to figure out every detail that you're going to play. So there's no character that you can just go put on his shirt and be fully prepared.

Most entertainment is trying to get you. It's tested, like toothpaste.

If you look at the best-seller list for American fiction, they're all sequels to detective stories or stories about hunting serial killers. That's what's called American fiction these days.

There's always the standard six people you can hire that have played all these villains in Hollywood. Instinctively, when they come on screen, you know what's going to happen. You don't know the story, but you know what they do.

I've always liked to think ahead. Not stupid-far ahead. A hundred years doesn't interest me. But 20 years interests me, and more for what happens to humans as opposed to things.

My friend Harry Nilsson used to say the definition of an artist was someone who rode way ahead of the herd and was sort of the lookout. Now you don't have to be that, to be an artist. You can be right smack-dab in the middle of the herd. If you are, you'll be the richest.

I'm not interesting enough on my own that you'd want to see a film about me.

Movies are an expensive business.

One of the things I like about a character: I always think it's fascinating when a character can turn on a dime and go from one emotion to another. I like watching that.

You never do a movie and not want it to work. You accept whatever it is. You have to, but nobody in their right mind would not want the movie to be getting talked about at the end of the year.

I've seen the future! It's a bald-headed man from New York!

The world really changed after 9/11, not just in the tragic way, but in every way. So it took me a couple of years to even understand how my art form I could process any of this. When the world changed, eliciting laughter with subjects that were funny to me before 9/11 just didnt seem good enough.

In the course of my movies, the financing and the releasing were always the tough part. Because I loved the creative, I loved the writing, I loved the making of it. Because I guess, I never had the giant blockbuster, I never got that sort of ease for the next one. So the next one was always, "how am I going to do this?" And that thing was sort of always the thing that made me a little chickenshit to go into the next one. The writing of it was great and the making of it was great, but how am I going to release this thing and am I going to find a studio?

Film is the cheapest part of the movie making process. The expense is the 100-man crew and the financing and everything.

I'm a big consumer of news and I have my six newspaper sites booked. And what I like bout Twitter is it's almost, it allows me to make a comment about something that's just on my mind.

You always got to be happy when somebody likes what you do. It's stupid not to be happy.

What naturally stops you making the film is there is no more money in the budget. That's really what it is. If you had an unlimited budget, if you were a billionaire and you financed your own movies, then you can either date, because you can sit in an editing room for six years, like Howard Hughes, and never finish anything.