Happy Birthday Mel Brooks!

Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.

If you're quiet, you're not living. You've got to be noisy and colorful and lively.

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.

As long as the world is turning and spinning, we're gonna be dizzy and we're gonna make mistakes.

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

If God wanted us to fly, He would have given us tickets.

A lot of music is mathematics. It's balance.

If presidents can't do it to their wives, they do it to their country.

Well, just being stupid and politically incorrect doesn't work. You can be politically incorrect if you're smart.

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

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.

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.

Immortality is a by-product of good work.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Life literally abounds in comedy if you just look around you.

Everything we do in life is based on fear, especially love.

I only direct in self-defense.

If Shaw and Einstein couldn't beat death, what chance have I got? Practically none.

You got to be brave. If you feel something, you've really got to risk it.

You're always a little disappointing in person because you can't be the edited essence of yourself.

I'll accept bad taste in a minute, as long as there's some great comedy minds and performances.

If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator you never win.

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.

But I have bad taste with a deep fount of intellectuality.

We want to get people laughing; we don't want to offend anybody.