I love acting, especially if it's a fantasy of some kind, where it's not just realistic, it's not naturalism.

I'd like to do a comedy with Emma Thompson. I admire her as an actress so much. I love her. And I didn't know it until recently that her whole career started in comedy.

The big catalyst was seeing my sister, when I was 11, doing a dramatic recital. When I saw her on the stage and everyone listening to her so patiently, quietly, that's all I wanted: for someone to look at me and listen to me, but in some beautiful and artistic way.

Actors fall into this trap if they missed being loved for who they really were and not for what they could do - sing, dance, joke about - then they take that as love.

I found a very diabolical way of making myself suffer - not in the same way [my mother ] was suffering but to prevent me from enjoying my own life.

Gene Wilder often said that his job as an actor wasn't to make something funny but to make it real.

And Mel [Brooks] - you have to understand this important point - he had done "The Producers" for $50,000 over two years, and he didn't make a penny from it. And then he did "The Twelve Chairs" - $50,000 for two more years and didn't make a penny from it. That's four years of work. And then they offered him quite a bit of money to direct "Young Frankenstein," and he took it.