Al Yankovic Quotes

I was a huge fan of 'Mad' magazine when I was 11, 12, 13 years old. I'd scour used bookstores trying to find back issues, and I'd wait at the newsstand for a new issue to come out. My life revolved around it.

I like the guitar-driven music of Nirvana at its peak. At that point, I thought there was a lot of really exciting music coming out.

It's hard to say, I picked one of my favorite articles for the MAD vault. Which is one of the features of the Magazine so they don't have to actually pay artists or writers to come up with new stuff.

Some people want to advertise their weirdness, and spread it out, that's not me.

By the time I'm in the studio recording my parody, 10,000 parodies of that song are on YouTube.

What kind of morons do you have working at newspapers in Austin that would base an entire review of an artist's performance on whether or not they had a good seat?

He died a long painful death. However, you'll be happy to hear that just a few years later he was reincarnated as Shirley MacLaine.

It fit pretty nicely into my schedule because we'd pretty much finished the bulk of promotion for Mandatory Fun and were just getting geared up for the World Tour so this was a nice time for me to be working on it.

I have very mixed feelings about it. On one hand, I’m concerned that the rampant downloading of my copyright-protected material over the Internet is severely eating into my album sales and having a decidedly adverse effect on my career. On the other hand, I can get all the Metallica songs I want for FREE! WOW!

As my father used to tell me, the only true sign of success in life is being able to do for a living that which makes you happy.

You got me stranded on the bungee tower of love.

I'd like to be able to be more topical and timely and more of-the-moment and I think the way to do that is, instead of waiting until I have twelve songs to release all at once, just to release them as I come up with them.

Well I've made no secret of my life long love of MAD Magazine, it's probably my first and greatest influence in terms of my comic sensibilities. I've known John [Ficarra] for many years, and we've been friends. About four or five months ago, at a dinner in New York, John made the very nice offer of my being guest editor for an issue of MAD and I thought about it for about half a nanosecond and decided that was a pretty good idea.

You still have Top 40 radio now, but it's 40 different stations. There aren't many hits that everybody knows, and there aren't many real superstars.

My hobbies just sort of gradually became my vocation.

When I swore that you're getting more and more beautiful everyday. Well, I was only kidding, honey.

I suppose I had my rock star fantasies while I was singing into my hairbrush in the bathroom mirror, but I never really consciously said, 'OK, this is what I'm going to do for a living and I'm going to be Weird Al.'

You don't need to be defined by your job.

I'm just a no-good, scum sucking, nose picking, boot licking, sniveling, groveling, worthless hunk of slime.

I can't get too offended when somebody parodies me.

I was abducted by some aliens from space who kind a looked like Jamie Farr.

Midget wrestling on channel 3, it costs me 50 bucks a month.

When I go to my live shows it's often a multigenerational audience, a family bonding experience.

I'm very analytical, I'm very precise. I mean, I don't write for kids.

A lot of my cartoon voices are basically just variations on my natural voice.

There are a lot of songs that would ostensibly be a good candidate for parody, yet I can't think of a clever enough idea.

Take down those naked pictures of Ernest Borgnine.

I mean, I hate to gloat, but I'm extremely satisfied with my position in life and the way things have worked out for me.

I enjoy all kinds of music. But it is kind of strange when I do parodies, instead of setting up drums and guitar amps.

You slammed my face down on the barbecue grill, now my scars are all healing, but my heart never will.

I did have a child, and I was reading a lot of picture books to her, but at the same time writing a children's book was something that I'd been wanting to do for many years, pretty much since the start of my career.

I'll be mellow when I'm dead.

I cut my teeth playing rock songs on the accordion when I was a teenager and my friends always thought that was extremely amusing. I think that was the genesis of my polka medleys, because every rock song I played on the accordion just sounded like a polka and my friends thought it was funny. So that was a joke that I continue up to this very day.

I'm a music fan, and I can listen to the radio, or music, without thinking, "How am I going to screw this up?" [Laughs] If I'm really actively trying to think of a parody, then I'll have my antenna out, and be a little more proactive about it.

I think I'm equally as abusive as the editors normally are for the "Letters and Tomatoes" column, which is the fan mail part of MAD Magazine and an ongoing feature.

If I could find the right kind of property, get tied in with the right movie, I'd love to be involved, but I just find it hard to be motivated to do another screenplay right now.

Got a brand new semi-automatic weapon with a laser sight. Oh, I'm praying that somebody tries to break in here tonight.

Whenever I do a parody it's not meant to make you hate anybody's music really.

I write and write and write, and then I edit it down to the parts that I think are amusing, or that help the storyline, or I'll write a notebook full of ideas of anecdotes or story points, and then I'll try and arrange them in a way that they would tell a semi-cohesive story.

You fake something until you're good at it.

When I started out, I didn't feel like I was really accepted in the music or comedy communities, and I was somewhere on the edge, but now I feel like I'm accepted in both, which is extremely gratifying.

I don't like to label myself. I know I'm very hard to pigeonhole.

I don't think there are any new media I'd like to cover.

When I was a kid, I thought I was going to be an architect, because when I was 12 years old I had a guidance counselor that convinced me that that was the best career choice for me.

It's hard to force creativity and humor.

It becomes more important to me as time goes on to make every album the best thing I've ever done, so it's a lot of self-imposed pressure that also kind of slows me down a bit.

I've learned how to use my spam filter pretty effectively.

If something is good enough, it can be out there and people will see it.