When your mother gives you confidence about anything that you do, you carry that confidence with you.She made me believe that I could make someone laugh.

But the acting process - create a human being - was real, not only to the audience, but real to me.

My basic mistake in 'The World's Greatest Lover' was that I made the leading character a neurotic kook and sent him to Hollywood. I should have made him a perfectly normal, sane, ordinary person, and sent him to Hollywood. The audience identifies with the lead character.

I had improvised a lot in classes and at the Actors Studio, but I never did it in front of the camera.

At the time, I didn't know why, but I know now that when I was a little boy, I was scared to death of the Frankenstein films ... and in all these years later, I wanted it to come out with a happy ending, and I think it was my fear of the Frankenstein movies when I was 8 and 9 and 10 years old that made me want to write that story [Young Frankenstein].

Great art direction is NOT the same thing as great film direction!

[Gilda Radner] was in the in vitro fertilization program, and it nearly, nearly drove us apart, too. She wanted that baby, so badly, and it didn't work. Oddly enough, when we were doing "Haunted Honeymoon" in London, she did become pregnant for about 10 days, but then she lost it. But, anyway, my odyssey with Gilda was wonderful, funny, torturous, painful and sad. It was - it went the full gamut.