Mel Brooks Quotes - Page 5

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

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!

Nothing is free. You got to pay to be in society. First you start with homework.

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

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

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

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.

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!"

We mock the things we are to be.

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

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

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."

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

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

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.

My job is to go out and entertain the most people possible. The job is to make people laugh. I don't have a mission. I don't have a torch to burn.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Judd Apatow is pretty good, both as a producer and as a director.

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.

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.

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