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Anybody can direct, but there are only eleven good writers.

Mel Brooks

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Mel Brooks
Age: 98
Born: 1926
Born: June 28
Actor
Composer
Film Actor
Film Director
Film Producer
Journalist
Librettist
Lyricist
Screenwriter
Soldier
Songwriter
Stage Actor
Brooklyn
New York
Melvin Brooks
Melvin Kaminsky
Eleven
Writers
Direct
Anybody
Comedy
Good

More quotes by Mel Brooks

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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
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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
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Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So for every ten Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast-beaters. By the time I was five I knew I was that one.
Mel Brooks
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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
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Good taste is the enemy of comedy.
Mel Brooks
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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
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It would be hypocritical of me to take issue with anything in questionable taste, seeing that I invented bad taste in films.
Mel Brooks
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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
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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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American sex is generally straight. It happens at 11 o'clock Saturday night. In the rural areas, it happens at nine and it happens pretty fast. Got to get up the next morning, especially if there're kids. Can't make noise, either, wake the kids.
Mel Brooks
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I only direct in self-defense.
Mel Brooks
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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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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
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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
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My liveliness is based on an incredible fear of death. In order to keep death at bay, I do a lot of Yah! Yah! Yah! And death says, All right. He's too noisy and busy. I'll wait for someone who's sitting quietly, half asleep.
Mel Brooks
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If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator you never win.
Mel Brooks
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But I have bad taste with a deep fount of intellectuality.
Mel Brooks
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Cat angels are the reason there are no mice angels.
Mel Brooks
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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
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I'm married to a beautiful and talented woman who can lift your spirits just by looking at you.
Mel Brooks