No creative writer knows what is commercial and what isn't. You just write from your heart, you write from the deepest, creative urges in you, and you write from your soul, and you just either get lucky or not.
Mel BrooksNever retire! Do what you do and keep doing it. But don't do it on Friday. Take Friday off. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, go fishing...Then Monday to Thursday, do what you've been doing all your life. My point is: Live full and don't retreat.
Mel BrooksWhat ignited the rocket that sent you up into the vast regions of comedy, and why? I would say, for me, that philosophical treatise about having black beginnings and wanting love to compensate for that, wanting audiences and wanting attention - I say, "Au contraire." Completely opposite. I want the continuation of my mother's incredible love and attention to me.
Mel BrooksComedy 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.
Mel BrooksThere's a lot of things that I've done to stick into the box set. You never have it this good. I think people should bargain. They shouldn't just buy the set, it's a little expensive [anyway]. But they should say - I'll give them dialogue, I'm a good writer.
Mel BrooksI have always been a huge admirer of my own work. I'm one of the funniest and most entertaining writers I know.
Mel BrooksAn 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.
Mel BrooksBeing short never bothered me for three seconds. The rest of the time I wanted to commit suicide.
Mel BrooksWhen I'm writing a script, I don't worry about plot as much as I do about people. I get to know the main characters - what they need, what they want, what they should do. That's what gets the story going. You can't just have action, you've got to find out what the characters want. And then they must grow, they must go somewhere.
Mel BrooksYou often hear that people go into show business to find the love they never had when they were children. Never believe it! Every comic and most of the actors I know had a childhood full of love. Then they grew up and found out that in the grown-up world, you don't get all that love, you just get your share. So they went into show business to recapture the love they had known as children when they were the center of the universe.
Mel BrooksI 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.
Mel BrooksTHE 2,000-YEAR-OLD MAN'S SECRETS OF LONGEVITY 1. Don't run for a bus - there'll always be another. 2. Never, ever touch fried food. 3. Stay out of a Ferrari or any other small Italian car. 4. Eat fruit - a nectarine - even a rotten plum is good.
Mel BrooksMy mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives.
Mel BrooksI know how to make it a great musical. I've got to. It's like I've got to see it on stage.
Mel BrooksWell, you know, 'Spaceballs' is a weird combination, because it's a simple, sweet little fairytale, and it's crazy and out-there and making fun of and taking apart sci-fi, 'Star Wars', and 'Star Trek'.
Mel BrooksI love spaghetti and sex, sometimes together. My dream of heaven is walking naked through fields of pasta fazool.
Mel BrooksRhetoric does not get you anywhere, because Hitler and Mussolini are just as good at rhetoric. But if you can bring these people down with comedy, they stand no chance.
Mel BrooksColeman Jacoby and Arnie Rosen won an Emmy and Mel Brooks didn't! Niezsche was right! There is no God! There is no God!
Mel BrooksWhen you come to Germany as a Jew you have an uneasy feeling, but I've always felt okay in Berlin.
Mel BrooksBasically, I'm a writer. I'm the proprietor of the vision. I alone know what I eventually want to happen on the screen. So if you have a valuable idea, the only way to protect it is to direct it.
Mel BrooksI always thought it was great to be able to make people feel better. It was a little like being God.
Mel BrooksOrganizations like the CIA and the FBI are still kind of supermen, kind of SS troops: We're blond and the best and everyone else should be incinerated. They don't know right from wrong. That's what makes a satire of these government bureaus really funny.
Mel BrooksWhen I was a little kid at home, I thought the whole world was Jewish. For years I thought Roosevelt was Jewish. I loved him. I thought of him as my father. I'm always stunned when I find out that people like Roosevelt and Tolstoy weren't Jewish. How could I love them so much?
Mel BrooksMy brothers went to work at 12 and put themselves through school and brought the family out of ruin into food and clothing.
Mel BrooksJewish women are very exciting, as exciting sexually as any other group. Even so, my advice to a young man marrying a Jewish girl would be to have three and a half years of foreplay. Of course, most girls in every group are reserved about getting down to it. They don't usually do it right away. But once they do it, women are bananas. They don't wanna do it, you can't make them do it, there's no way they'll do it - but once they do it, they don't let you alone.
Mel BrooksAll 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.
Mel BrooksMy job is to go out and entertain the most people possible. The job is to make people laugh. I don't have a mission. I don't have a torch to burn.
Mel BrooksDirecting 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.
Mel BrooksMy mother is very short - four-eleven. She could walk under tables and never hit her head.
Mel BrooksAny 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!"
Mel Brooks