Mel Brooks Quotes about Writing

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

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

"Mel Brooks Is Always Funny and Often Wise in This 1975 Playboy Interview". Interview with Alex Belth, www.thedailybeast.com. February 16, 2014.

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

" Mel Brooks on the Secret to Fart Sounds, Why Comedy’s Gotten Lazy and His New PBS Doc ‘Mel Brooks: Make a Noise’" by Matt Singer, www.indiewire.com. May 16, 2013.

Everything starts with writing.

Mel Brooks

Writing

"Mel Brooks on the Secret to Fart Sounds, Why Comedy’s Gotten Lazy and His New PBS Doc ‘Mel Brooks: Make a Noise’". Interview with Matt Singer, www.indiewire.com. May 16, 2013.

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

Writing, Character, People

"Mel Brooks Is Always Funny and Often Wise in This 1975 Playboy Interview". Interview with Alex Belth, www.thedailybeast.com. February 16, 2014.

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.

Mel Brooks

Writing, Character, Names

"Why Mel Brooks can save the human race" by Alastair Campbell, www.theguardian.com. November 2, 2006.

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.

Mel Brooks

Writing, Thinking, Alzheimer's

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, Writing

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