Top 100 Mel Brooks Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “There’s no such thing as too far. If it works it’s funny, if it doesn’t work it’s too far, it’s stupid. Really there’s no such thing as “too far.” You’re joining the politically correct when you use words like “too far.” You don’t want to join the army of politically correct.”

— Mel Brooks

52. “I had low blood sugar, a chemical imbalance, plus the normal nervous breakdown everyone goes through from adolescence to adulthood.”

— Mel Brooks

53. “When I was a little kid at home, I thought the whole world was Jewish. For years I thought Roosevelt was Jewish. I loved him. I thought of him as my father. I’m always stunned when I find out that people like Roosevelt and Tolstoy weren’t Jewish. How could I love them so much?”

— Mel Brooks

54. “Bad taste is simply saying the truth before it should be said.”

— Mel Brooks

55. “I make people laugh for a living. I believe I can say objectively that what I do I do as well as anybody. Just say I’m one of the best broken field runners that ever lived. For 35 years I was a cult hero, an underground funny.”

— Mel Brooks

56. “The thing is to be brave and move the audience with you, instead of cater to the lowest common denominator, you know, slipping on a banana peel and falling on your ass. You got to move the audience a little further ahead in terms of their appreciation of what is comedy. It’s complicated.”

— Mel Brooks

57. “Some critics are emotionally desiccated, personally about as attractive as a year-old peach in a single girl’s refrigerator.”

— Mel Brooks

58. “Being short never bothered me for three seconds. The rest of the time I wanted to commit suicide.”

— Mel Brooks

59. “Tolstoy was the most gifted writer who ever lived. It’s like he stuck a pen in his heart and it didn’t even go through his mind on its way to the page.”

— Mel Brooks

60. “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.”

— Mel Brooks

61. “All short women have a delayed fuse. Marry a taller woman: My wife was an inch or two taller than me; it’s a sign of security.”

— Mel Brooks

62. “Cat angels are the reason there are no mice angels.”

— Mel Brooks

63. “Creative people should always be striving, they should always be hungry, they should be looking for the next place to go.”

— Mel Brooks

64. “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.”

— Mel Brooks

65. “Liebkind: Hitler. There was a painter. He could paint an entire apartment in one afternoon. Two coats!”

— Mel Brooks

66. “When I was a little boy, I thought when I grew up I would talk Yiddish. I thought little kids talked English, but when they became adults, they would talk Yiddish like the adults did. There would be no reason to talk English anymore, because we would have made it.”

— Mel Brooks

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

— Mel Brooks

68. “My God, I’d love to smash into the casket of Dostoyevsky, grab that bony hand and scream at the remains, ‘Well done, you god-damn genius.’”

— Mel Brooks

69. “There’s an army story in me, and I think there’s a WWII Brooks film somewhere.”

— Mel Brooks

70. “Making a movie is like making an ocean voyage, and the script is your ship.”

— Mel Brooks

71. “You want me to admit I’m a four-foot, six-inch freckle-faced person of Jewish extraction? I admit it. All but the extraction. But being short never bothered me for three seconds. The rest of the time I wanted to commit suicide.”

— Mel Brooks

72. “I have always been a huge admirer of my own work. I’m one of the funniest and most entertaining writers I know.”

— Mel Brooks

73. “I love gentiles. In fact, on of my favorite activities is Protestant spotting.”

— Mel Brooks

74. “My brothers went to work at 12 and put themselves through school and brought the family out of ruin into food and clothing.”

— Mel Brooks

75. “Organizations like the CIA and the FBI are still kind of supermen, kind of SS troops: We’re blond and the best and everyone else should be incinerated. They don’t know right from wrong. That’s what makes a satire of these government bureaus really funny.”

— Mel Brooks

76. “I realised that all one really had to do was just observe. Observe and slightly exaggerate, and you had comedy. Instead of creating a mythical premise for a stupid joke, I found playing off truth got the best result.”

— Mel Brooks

77. “Why should I waste my good time making a straight dramatic film? The people who can’t make you laugh can do that.”

— Mel Brooks

78. “I don’t believe in this business of being behind, better to be in front.”

— Mel Brooks

79. “My movies were not reaping the kind of emotional rewards that I wanted. I wanted them to be appreciated and they weren’t. I didn’t want the reviews to say, “Mel Brooks has made another movie,” and you get the title somewhere in the second paragraph.”

— Mel Brooks

80. “Do you have a dollar on you? I hate to answer questions for nothing.”

— Mel Brooks

81. “There’s not enough bad taste! I LOVE bad taste! I live for bad taste! I am the spokesman for bad taste!”

— Mel Brooks

82. “Look, I really 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 got to jump around a lot, you got to make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death. And therefore, as I see it, if you’re quiet, you’re not living. You’ve got to be noisy, or at least your thoughts should be noisy, colorful and lively.”

— Mel Brooks

83. “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.”

— Mel Brooks

84. “The audience got jaded, they want a hit, they want a big success, and so you don’t want to experiment because you say, well, I’ll disappoint the audience, they may not like it, I better do something that I think is more commercial.”

— Mel Brooks

85. “When we got to our hotel rooms, mosquitoes as big as George Foreman were waiting for us. They were sitting in armchairs with their legs crossed.”

— Mel Brooks

86. “Directing is a terrible, anxious process. It’s all collaboration, and if you have a dream, it’s diluted very quickly by the slightest ineptness in any of your collaborators. They’re supposed to help you, but too often they help you into your grave.”

— Mel Brooks

87. “We want to get people laughing; we don’t want to offend anybody.”

— Mel Brooks

88. “Basically, I’m a writer. I’m the proprietor of the vision. I alone know what I eventually want to happen on the screen. So if you have a valuable idea, the only way to protect it is to direct it.”

— Mel Brooks

89. “I wanted to entertain so badly that I kept at it until I was good. I just browbeat my way into show business.”

— Mel Brooks

90. “I’m always stunned when I find out people like Roosevelt and Tolstoy weren’t Jewish. How could I love them so much?”

— Mel Brooks

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

— Mel Brooks

92. “When you get big special effects pictures, sci-fi and things, there’s little or no comedy. Or it’s a domestic comedy and there’s not one special effect. But very rarely do these things fuse and come out right.”

— Mel Brooks

93. “It would be hypocritical of me to take issue with anything in questionable taste, seeing that I invented bad taste in films.”

— Mel Brooks

94. “Bialystock: Leo – he who hesitates is poor!”

— Mel Brooks

95. “I always thought it was great to be able to make people feel better. It was a little like being God.”

— Mel Brooks

96. “My mother is very short – four-eleven. She could walk under tables and never hit her head.”

— Mel Brooks

97. “I have been lucky that some critics joined the mob in loving something I’ve done, or in appreciating it. I’ve been lucky. But most of the critics don’t like what the people like. I think they have a very strange job, and they are meant to criticize.”

— Mel Brooks

98. “I like people with big talents and small neuroses – not always an easy combination to find. I’ve discovered that if the neurosis is too big, it diminishes the talent and you wind up working too hard for what you get.”

— Mel Brooks

99. “I was in the army, and to me it was like a newsreel.”

— Mel Brooks

100. “We laughed hard at real stories of tragedy. It had to be real and it had to be funny. Somebody getting hurt was wonderful. Later, as the 2000 Year Old Man with Carl Reiner I explained the difference between comedy and tragedy: If I cut my finger, that’s tragedy. Comedy is if you walk into an open sewer and die.”

— Mel Brooks