Top 120 Al Yankovic Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 3

51. “That’s something the kids should know about. Reading is a gateway to witchcraft and lesbianism.”

— Al Yankovic

52. “Beans, beans, the magic legumes – the more you ingest, the more you consume.”

— Al Yankovic

53. “I don’t like to label myself. I know I’m very hard to pigeonhole.”

— 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. “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

56. “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

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

— Al Yankovic

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

— Al Yankovic

59. “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

60. “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

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

— Al Yankovic

62. “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

63. “My wife went off with Elvis.”

— Al Yankovic

64. “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

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

— Al Yankovic

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

— Al Yankovic

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

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

— Al Yankovic

71. “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

72. “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

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

— Al Yankovic

74. “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

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

— Al Yankovic

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

— Al Yankovic

77. “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

78. “Velvet Elvis never puts on weight.”

— Al Yankovic

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

— Al Yankovic

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

— Al Yankovic

81. “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

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

— Al Yankovic

83. “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

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

— Al Yankovic

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

— Al Yankovic

86. “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

87. “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

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

— Al Yankovic

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

— Al Yankovic

90. “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

91. “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

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

— 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. “It’s hard to say, I picked one of my favorite articles for the MAD vault. Which is one of the features of the Magazine so they don’t have to actually pay artists or writers to come up with new stuff.”

— Al Yankovic

95. “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

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

— Al Yankovic

97. “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

98. “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

99. “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

100. “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