Quotes By Mel Brooks

A lot of music is mathematics. It's balance.

As long as the world is turning and spinning, we're gonna be dizzy and we're gonna make mistakes.

When you come to Germany as a Jew you have an uneasy feeling, but I've always felt okay in Berlin.

Everything we do in life is based on fear, especially love.

I don't have a mission. I don't have a torch to burn.

I know how to make it a great musical. I've got to. It's like I've got to see it on stage.

Look, I don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive you've got to flap your arms and legs, you've got to jump around a lot, for life is the very opposite of death, and therefore you must at very least think noisy and colorfully, or you're not alive.

I love writing songs. I'm a songwriter.

Judd Apatow is pretty good, both as a producer and as a director.

If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator you never win.

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

I only direct in self-defense.

If God wanted us to fly, He would have given us tickets.

We want to get people laughing; we don't want to offend anybody.

No, no, the songs write themselves, almost.

The brilliance of Max Brooks is that he always quotes authorities at the back of his books that never existed. Like a Russian professor he made up that validates a story or character.

Immortality is a by-product of good work.

Oh, I'm not a true genius. I'm a near genius. I would say I'm a short genius. I'd rather be tall and normal than a short genius.

There's an army story in me, and I think there's a WWII Brooks film somewhere.

I was a soldier in WWII. The last couple of months of the war I was actually in combat.

You're always a little disappointing in person because you can't be the edited essence of yourself.

If you're quiet, you're not living. You've got to be noisy and colorful and lively.

I'm still a horse that can run. I may not be able to win the Derby, but what do you do when you retire? People retire and they vegetate. They go away and they dry up.

But I have bad taste with a deep fount of intellectuality.

Dom DeLuise was a big man in every way. He was big in size and created big laughter and joy.

Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.

He who hesitates is poor.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

A cinema villain essentially needs a moustache so he can twiddle with it gleefully as he cooks up his next nasty plan.

Life literally abounds in comedy if you just look around you.