Best 109 quotes of Mel Brooks on MyQuotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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!

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!

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Good taste is the enemy of comedy.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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 love writing songs. I'm a songwriter.

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

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

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!'

Immortality is a by-product of good work.

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.

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

I only direct in self-defense.

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.

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