I love [Nikolai] Gogol's great eye for idiot behavior. Gogol said that life is so tragic, so stupendously sad that we'd better laugh a lot and enjoy ourselves. You either get a sense of humor going or you go under.

You're young forever when you write. Alfred Hitchcock directed until the day he died. As long as you don't have any dementia or Alzheimer's, if you have your All-Bran every day and clear yourself out, I think your brains are gonna be all right.

I also try to surround myself with people I love - make a family out of the company. So I tend to use the same people over and over. There's a sort of Mel Brooks Repertory Company.

We rest our case on the production numbers.

You want to be as smart as you can about being stupid.

When 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.

I'll accept bad taste in a minute, as long as there's some great comedy minds and performances.