Top 120 Al Yankovic Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Got a brand new semi-automatic weapon with a laser sight. Oh, I’m praying that somebody tries to break in here tonight.”

— Al Yankovic

52. “I don’t think there are any new media I’d like to cover.”

— Al Yankovic

53. “I don’t watch a lot of other people’s parodies because I don’t want to be unduly influenced.”

— Al Yankovic

54. “As much as people are griping about the Internet taking sales away from artists, it’s been a huge promotional tool for me.”

— Al Yankovic

55. “I mean, I hate to gloat, but I’m extremely satisfied with my position in life and the way things have worked out for me.”

— Al Yankovic

56. “When I was a kid, I thought I was going to be an architect, because when I was 12 years old I had a guidance counselor that convinced me that that was the best career choice for me.”

— Al Yankovic

57. “I think I’m equally as abusive as the editors normally are for the “Letters and Tomatoes” column, which is the fan mail part of MAD Magazine and an ongoing feature.”

— Al Yankovic

58. “I try not to go the obvious route all the time, but sometimes the most obvious is actually the best.”

— Al Yankovic

59. “Didn’t have Nintendo, we just poured salt on snails.”

— Al Yankovic

60. “I’ve done a movie and a TV series, and someday I’d like to do a successful movie and a successful TV series. That would be nice.”

— Al Yankovic

61. “How can you get bored if the audience is cheering and laughing at something you’re doing?”

— Al Yankovic

62. “A lot of rap songs don’t usually have a lot of melody per se.”

— Al Yankovic

63. “The music has always been my bread and butter, and I’ve focused more of my attention on that.”

— Al Yankovic

64. “Not any specific one, but I was a huge fan of Frank Jacobs, I guess he wrote the plurality of the song parodies for MAD, Sam Hart, a few others, but that was also where I was first exposed to the art form of song parodies.”

— Al Yankovic

65. “You fake something until you’re good at it.”

— Al Yankovic

66. “I make charts of songs that are good candidates, good targets, so to speak. Then I try to come up with ideas for parodies. And 99% of those ideas are horrible.”

— Al Yankovic

67. “People that were a little nerdy in high school would look up to me and know it gets better.”

— Al Yankovic

68. “It fit pretty nicely into my schedule because we’d pretty much finished the bulk of promotion for Mandatory Fun and were just getting geared up for the World Tour so this was a nice time for me to be working on it.”

— Al Yankovic

69. “He died a long painful death. However, you’ll be happy to hear that just a few years later he was reincarnated as Shirley MacLaine.”

— Al Yankovic

70. “My wife went off with Elvis.”

— Al Yankovic

71. “Right now I’m listening to a lot of Top 40 music, because THAT’S MY JOB.”

— Al Yankovic

72. “I write and write and write, and then I edit it down to the parts that I think are amusing, or that help the storyline, or I’ll write a notebook full of ideas of anecdotes or story points, and then I’ll try and arrange them in a way that they would tell a semi-cohesive story.”

— Al Yankovic

73. “I’d like to be able to be more topical and timely and more of-the-moment and I think the way to do that is, instead of waiting until I have twelve songs to release all at once, just to release them as I come up with them.”

— Al Yankovic

74. “Midget wrestling on channel 3, it costs me 50 bucks a month.”

— Al Yankovic

75. “It becomes more important to me as time goes on to make every album the best thing I’ve ever done, so it’s a lot of self-imposed pressure that also kind of slows me down a bit.”

— Al Yankovic

76. “People say releasing an album is like giving birth, but it’s more like having a gallbladder operation.”

— Al Yankovic

77. “I can’t get too offended when somebody parodies me.”

— Al Yankovic

78. “Probably 90 percent of my albums have polka medleys.”

— Al Yankovic

79. “I do a lot of different things, sometimes at the same time, and it’s very difficult to figure out where I fit.”

— Al Yankovic

80. “Velvet Elvis never puts on weight.”

— Al Yankovic

81. “There’s enough people that do unfunny music. I’ll leave the serious stuff to Paris Hilton and Kevin Federline.”

— Al Yankovic

82. “I love the way they run in fright when I turn on the kitchen light. And when I squish them on the ground, they make a pleasant crunchy sound.”

— Al Yankovic

83. “Pop culture’s gotten much more disposable.”

— Al Yankovic

84. “In a genre where most of the artists are one-hit wonders, I’ve been able to hang around longer than most “serious” acts. I pride myself in being a very talented leech.”

— Al Yankovic

85. “Every night for dinner we had a big chunk of dirt.”

— Al Yankovic

86. “There are probably a few library fines I haven’t paid yet, but I’m a pretty clean-cut guy overall.”

— Al Yankovic

87. “I don’t really look at myself as the kind of person who craves attention, but I’ve never been to therapy so there’s probably a lot of stuff about myself that I don’t know.”

— Al Yankovic

88. “One of the hardest things I’ve had to deal with in my career is keeping my material topical even though I only release albums every three or four years.”

— Al Yankovic

89. “As a kid, I certainly never thought I would get to spend my life doing something fun.”

— Al Yankovic

90. “If something is good enough, it can be out there and people will see it.”

— Al Yankovic

91. “In the ’80s, I was putting out an album virtually every year, I think mostly based on fear – that if I didn’t, people would soon forget about me.”

— Al Yankovic

92. “My process for the parodies is that I get an idea for a song and then get approval from the artist and then go in and record it and probably try to get it out as soon as possible.”

— Al Yankovic

93. “You still have Top 40 radio now, but it’s 40 different stations. There aren’t many hits that everybody knows, and there aren’t many real superstars.”

— Al Yankovic

94. “I know now that everything I write, I’m going to put out, and I’ll have to live with it for the rest of my life.”

— Al Yankovic

95. “People never ask people doing serious music, ‘Do you ever think about doing funny music?’”

— Al Yankovic

96. “As it turns out, there is a thing called the Internet, and stuff does go out there whether the suits like it or not.”

— Al Yankovic

97. “In the ’80s, I was the only game in town, I was the only one getting that kind of exposure in any rotation on MTV. Now with internet culture it seems like everyone is doing music parodies. And they’re not all good!”

— Al Yankovic

98. “You can try on our suede underwear if you choose. Do what you want, but don’t step on my blue suede shoes.”

— Al Yankovic

99. “There are a lot of songs that would ostensibly be a good candidate for parody, yet I can’t think of a clever enough idea.”

— Al Yankovic

100. “I start with a comprehensive list of all the recent songs that have been big hits – and then I go down that list and see if I can come up with funny ideas for them. I can always come up with ideas, but not necessarily good ones!”

— Al Yankovic