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

I came home [after funerals] and I thought if I go back to California, where I had a small house, I don't think I'll ever come east again. So I decided to stay and go through the halls and stairways, talk to Gilda Radner, holler, express some of my anger and make sure there were no ghosts in the hallways that I should ever be afraid of.And then I found out - it sounds strange, but I found out she had left me the house. We never talked about her dying and what she was going to leave me or I would ever leave her. We just didn't talk about those things.

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.

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.

If the physical thing you're doing is funny, you don't have to act funny while doing it...Just be real and it will be funnier

Which one of us, anywhere in the world, doesn't yearn to be believed when the audience is watching?

I write funny. If I can make my wife laugh, I know I'm on the right track. But yes, I don't like to get Maudlin. And I have a tendency towards it.