Top 60 Albert Brooks Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A lot of alliteration from anxious anchors placed in powerful posts!”

— Albert Brooks

2. “It’s fear. Fear is like a giant fog. It sits on your brain and blocks everything. Real feeling, true happiness, real joy, they can’t get through that fog. But you lift it and buddy you’re in for the ride of your life.”

— Albert Brooks

3. “Don’t worry, and don’t kick yourself forever. Just take the opportunities when they come.”

— Albert Brooks

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4. “It’s better to be known by six people for something you’re proud of than to be known by sixty million for something you’re not.”

— Albert Brooks

5. “I don’t know that I can define fear. But one of the sources of fear is holding up some sort of model life that doesn’t exist and feeling like you’re far away from it.”

— Albert Brooks

6. “Wouldn’t this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive?”

— Albert Brooks

7. “Relaxation is the absence of worry.”

— Albert Brooks

8. “I have children. I have a family to support. But I really could live in a one-room apartment, as long as the television worked. I never needed anything. Just a comfortable chair and I’m fine.”

— Albert Brooks

9. “I don’t experience basic human emotions. It’s not my thing.”

— Albert Brooks

10. “I’ve seen the future! It’s a bald-headed man from New York!”

— Albert Brooks

11. “Being a screenwriter in Hollywood is like being a eunuch at an orgy. Worse, actually, at least the eunuch is allowed to watch.”

— Albert Brooks

12. “Your spouse should be just attractive enough to turn you on. Anything more is trouble.”

— Albert Brooks

13. “I’ve never been disappointed, because I’ve never given somebody I liked that much power.”

— Albert Brooks

14. “My friend Harry Nilsson used to say the definition of an artist was someone who rode way ahead of the herd and was sort of the lookout. Now you don’t have to be that, to be an artist. You can be right smack-dab in the middle of the herd. If you are, you’ll be the richest.”

— Albert Brooks

15. “If anything happens to me, tell every woman I’ve ever gone with I was talking about her at the end. That way, they’ll have to reevaluate me.”

— Albert Brooks

16. “You make friends with older people and you always feel young no matter what.”

— Albert Brooks

17. “I’m not a person who I ever thought would do well with divorce. Not that it can’t happen. I just didn’t want that. So I waited a long time to meet the right person. Then I finally met someone that I was willing to be divorced from.”

— Albert Brooks

18. “Starting to drink now in preparation for New Years. No more last minute stuff like Christmas.”

— Albert Brooks

19. “I got so good at writing to a budget, my brain was restricting myself. I’d write, It’s a stormy night. Then I’d cross out stormy. I’d write: It’s a calm night. Then I’d cross out night. It’s noon. Because you know how much night costs. You know how much rain costs. Nothing comes free in movies.”

— Albert Brooks

20. “Excited about Black Friday. Also excited about Jew Tuesday.”

— Albert Brooks

21. “Nobody will leave any place unless they’re forced out. That’s the nature of humans. Once you’re there, you’re there. I’ve never seen anybody get up voluntarily and leave any place.”

— Albert Brooks

22. “Donald Trump announces this morning that he will run for president. His hair will announce on Friday.”

— Albert Brooks

23. “One of the things I like about a character: I always think it’s fascinating when a character can turn on a dime and go from one emotion to another. I like watching that.”

— Albert Brooks

24. “As an actor, if you’re just sitting and staring and you don’t know who you are in your own mind, it’s vacant. And sometimes the camera is an X-ray machine, it can pick it up.”

— Albert Brooks

25. “Twitter, to me, works if you’re funny. Twitter doesn’t work as a promotional tool unless you do it very, very, very occasionally.”

— Albert Brooks

26. “If you want to be a writer, just write. There’s no magic to it.”

— Albert Brooks

27. “My mother was supportive without knowing it. Deep down she wanted all the right things, she just didn’t see the world like I did, and she’s not supposed to.”

— Albert Brooks

28. “All improv turns into anger. All comedy improv basically turns into anger, because that’s all people know how to do when they’re improvising. If you notice shows that are improvising are generally people yelling at each other.”

— Albert Brooks

29. “I’d still like to see ‘Survivor’ minus the planned show-biz parts. That would be the purest form of show business – I want to see someone so hungry that they eat somebody else’s foot.”

— Albert Brooks

30. “Art and resistance are great together. That’s what art’s made for. Look at Vincent van Gogh: He didn’t cut off his ear because he was selling well.”

— Albert Brooks

31. “Acceptance is going to a restaurant where the salad’s not great, but the steak is fine.”

— Albert Brooks

32. “I don’t want to get close to people who have secrets that I don’t know about.”

— Albert Brooks

33. “Film is the cheapest part of the movie making process. The expense is the 100-man crew and the financing and everything.”

— Albert Brooks

34. “When I went to acting school, the kids that got the best grades were the kids that could cry on cue. But it didn’t really translate into careers for any of them, because the external is the easy part.”

— Albert Brooks

35. “I’ve always liked to think ahead. Not stupid-far ahead. A hundred years doesn’t interest me. But 20 years interests me, and more for what happens to humans as opposed to things.”

— Albert Brooks

36. “You know, I became a director out of necessity. I was writing comedies, and I couldn’t find anybody to deliver it correctly.”

— Albert Brooks

37. “If you look at the best-seller list for American fiction, they’re all sequels to detective stories or stories about hunting serial killers. That’s what’s called American fiction these days.”

— Albert Brooks

38. “What’s interesting about books that take place in the future, even twenty years in the future, is that many of them are black or white: It’s either a utopia or it’s misery. The real truth is that there’s going to be both things in any future, just like there is now.”

— Albert Brooks

39. “Well, you know, with every character, if you’re going to expose yourself, you’ve got to figure out every detail that you’re going to play. So there’s no character that you can just go put on his shirt and be fully prepared.”

— Albert Brooks

40. “Regrets are stupid; they don’t mean anything and they don’t add up to anything.”

— Albert Brooks

41. “Most entertainment is trying to get you. It’s tested, like toothpaste.”

— Albert Brooks

42. “I’m a big consumer of news and I have my six newspaper sites booked. And what I like bout Twitter is it’s almost, it allows me to make a comment about something that’s just on my mind.”

— Albert Brooks

43. “I, sort of, got into comedy accidentally, and it got bigger than I wanted it to.”

— Albert Brooks

44. “Getting older is a lot of fun. Right up there with chewing glass or putting your hand in a blender.”

— Albert Brooks

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45. “When I audition, I understand what it takes and the insecurities that come with it. If I do anything, I put actors at ease. I used to tell directors who weren’t actors, the best thing they could do was take an acting class for a couple of months. Just to understand.”

— Albert Brooks

46. “I’ve always felt like I work in a small little area that doesn’t represent anything like the rest of society.”

— Albert Brooks

47. “Even though my father was a radio comedian, it wasn’t cool to say, at a young age, ‘I want to be a comedian.’”

— Albert Brooks

48. “There’s nothing funny about flying to Houston.”

— Albert Brooks

49. “I’ve always been the king of silence. I’ve always been a minimalist comedian. I’ve taken my influence from Jack Benny, who was the king of that I’ve always done ‘less is more.’”

— Albert Brooks

50. “You never do a movie and not want it to work. You accept whatever it is. You have to, but nobody in their right mind would not want the movie to be getting talked about at the end of the year.”

— Albert Brooks