These Mel Brooks quotes will inspire you. Mel Brooks is an American actor, comedian, film producer, director, and screenwriter.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging Mel Brooks quotes, Mel Brooks sayings, and Mel Brooks proverbs.
Best Mel Brooks Quotes
- “I’ve been accused of vulgarity. I say that’s bullshit.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “Hope for the Best. Expect the worst. Life is a play. We’re unrehearsed.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “If presidents can’t do it to their wives, they do it to their country.” ~ Mel Brooks
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“The only thing we don’t have a god for is premature ejaculation… but I hear that it’s coming quickly.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “Tragedy is what happens to me; comedy is what happens to you.” ~ Mel Brooks , Mel Brooks quotes about comedy
- “I don’t know what to say so I’ll just say what’s in my heart…badoom, badoom, badoom.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “As long as the world is turning and spinning, we’re gonna be dizzy and we’re gonna make mistakes.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “When I was a little kid, if somebody said they were thirty-five, I’d say “Oooh, they’re going to die soon”. But as I get older it doesn’t mean a thing. You mustn’t ever give in. Never give in to thinking you’re old, because you’re never old. Your mind, and I tell you this and listen to me carefully, your mind is never, ever old, it’s eternally young.” ~ Mel Brooks
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“If God wanted us to fly, He would have given us tickets.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “Feeling different, feeling alienated, feeling persecuted, feeling that the only way to deal with the world is to laugh – because if you don’t laugh you’re going to cry and never stop crying – that’s probably what’s responsible for the Jews having developed such a great sense of humor. The people who had the greatest reason to weep, learned more than anyone else how to laugh.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “Life literally abounds in comedy if you just look around you.” ~ Mel Brooks
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“Bad taste is simply saying the truth before it should be said.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “If you’re alive, make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “Humor is just another defense against the universe.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “Cat angels are the reason there are no mice angels.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “In real life people fart, in the movies, people don’t. Why not? Farts are a repressed minority. The mouth gets to say all kinds of things, but the other place is supposed to keep quiet. But maybe our lower colons have something interesting to say. Maybe we should listen to them. Farts are human, more human than a lot of people I know. I think we should bring them out of the water closet and into the parlor.” ~ Mel Brooks
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“You want to be as smart as you can about being stupid.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “I was born on the kitchen table. We were so poor my mother couldn’t afford to have me; the lady next door gave birth to me.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “Never retire! Do what you do and keep doing it. But don’t do it on Friday. Take Friday off. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, go fishing…Then Monday to Thursday, do what you’ve been doing all your life. My point is: Live full and don’t retreat.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “I knew it… I’m surrounded by assholes!” ~ Mel Brooks
- “I’ve been taught ever since I was a kid that sex is filthy and forbidden, and that’s the way I think it should be. The filthier and more forbidden it is, the more exciting it is.” ~ Mel Brooks
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“Everything we do in life is based on fear, especially love.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “Being short never bothered me for three seconds. The rest of the time I wanted to commit suicide.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “My favorite expression is: When you go up to the bell, ring it ? or don’t go up to the bell.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “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
- “I love spaghetti and sex, sometimes together. My dream of heaven is walking naked through fields of pasta fazool.” ~ Mel Brooks
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“He who hesitates is poor.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “Well, just being stupid and politically incorrect doesn’t work. You can be politically incorrect if you’re smart.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “I was adored [as a kid]. I was always in the air, hurled up and kissed and thrown in the air again. Until I was six, my feet didn’t touch the ground. “Look at those eyes! That nose! Those lips! That tooth! Get that child away from me, quick! I’ll eat him!” Giving that up was very difficult later on in life.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “A cinema villain essentially needs a moustache so he can twiddle with it gleefully as he cooks up his next nasty plan.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “Humor keeps the elderly rolling along, singing a song. When you laugh, its an involuntary explosion of the lungs. The lungs need to replenish themselves with oxygen. So you laugh, you breathe, the blood runs, and everything is circulating. If you dont laugh, youll die.” ~ Mel Brooks
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“One day, God said ‘Let there be prey.’ And he created pigeons, rabbits, lambs and Gene Wilder.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “The Twelve Chairs is about the same thing. It’s all about money or love. We know we need money, we know we have to get money, we know we have to hurt others to get money. But we don’t know until maybe it’s a little too late in life that love is the most important thing. Love, friendship, affection, bonhomie, whatever. Those are the only things that really count: to love and be loved.” ~ Mel Brooks , Mel Brooks quotes on love
- “I don’t think in terms of results at all. I think: what next insanity can I shock the world with?” ~ Mel Brooks
- “You got to be brave. If you feel something, you’ve really got to risk it.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “Everything starts with writing. And then to support your vision, your ideas, your philosophy, your jokes, whatever, you’ve gotta perform them and/or direct them, or sometimes just produce them.” ~ Mel Brooks
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“With the birth of the artist came the inevitable afterbirth… the critic” ~ Mel Brooks
- “Do you have a dollar on you? I hate to answer questions for nothing.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “There’s not enough bad taste! I LOVE bad taste! I live for bad taste! I am the spokesman for bad taste!” ~ Mel Brooks
- “All right, I am often brash, rude and brutally direct. Someday I’m going to die and I don’t have time to toe-dance around the periphery of hatred.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “Let’s have a merry journey, and shout about how light is good and dark is not. What we should do is not future ourselves so much. We should now ourselves. “Now thyself” is more important than “know thyself.” Reason is what tells us to ignore the present and live in the future. So all we do is make plans. We think that somewhere there are going to be green pastures. It’s crazy. Heaven is nothing but a grand, monumental instance of future. Listen, now is good. Now is wonderful.” ~ Mel Brooks
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“Critics can’t even make music by rubbing their back legs together.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “Comedy is serious – deadly serious. Never, never try to be funny! The actors must be serious. Only the situation must be absurd. Funny is in the writing, not in the performing. If the situation isn’t absurd, no amount of joke will help.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “The audience. They see the name Mel Brooks, they want something really funny. They don’t want to be moved; they don’t want to be taught any lessons. […] I get more letters for Twelve Chairs and Life Stinks than I get from any other movies, because people actually agree with the philosophy, or were moved, or they love the movie.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “My mother is very short – four-eleven. She could walk under tables and never hit her head.” ~ Mel Brooks
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“Now thyself is more important than “Know thyself.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “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
- “Comedy is lively, comedy is joy, and that’s what keeps us [people] going, we’ve got to look forward to little, little happiness’s. Little, little joys, and comedy is very, very important, it’s a vital. We underestimate its value, but we should see more comedies. Comedy is life giving, it’s invigorating. I really believe it.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “I usually start with the words. The rhythm of the words gives me the rhythm of the song, and then I look for the musical highlights in it to carry it.” ~ Mel Brooks
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“Everything starts with writing.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “When I’m writing a script, I don’t worry about plot as much as I do about people. I get to know the main characters – what they need, what they want, what they should do. That’s what gets the story going. You can’t just have action, you’ve got to find out what the characters want. And then they must grow, they must go somewhere.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “An egg cream can do anything. An egg cream to a Brooklyn Jew is like water to an Arab. A Jew will kill for an egg cream. It’s the Jewish malmsey.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “Be interested in everything. You don’t have to adore it. I don’t adore hip-hop, I don’t think it’s great music, but I’m interested, I listen. I watch a lot of new films, I see everything. I still read, I like books, whether they are old books, new books. I’m interested – you gotta stay interested!” ~ Mel Brooks
- “If Shaw and Einstein couldn’t beat death, what chance have I got? Practically none.” ~ Mel Brooks
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“You cannot have fun with anything that you don’t love or admire or respect.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “You’re always a little disappointing in person because you can’t be the edited essence of yourself.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “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
- “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
- “Rhetoric does not get you anywhere, because Hitler and Mussolini are just as good at rhetoric. But if you can bring these people down with comedy, they stand no chance.” ~ Mel Brooks
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“My job is to go out and entertain the most people possible.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “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.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “Good taste is the enemy of comedy.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “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
- “It would be hypocritical of me to take issue with anything in questionable taste, seeing that I invented bad taste in films.” ~ Mel Brooks
