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Hope for the Best. Expect the worst. Life is a play. We're unrehearsed.

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
Life
Unrehearsed
Expect
Worst
Hope
Inspirational
Best
Play

More quotes by Mel Brooks

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Well, you know, 'Spaceballs' is a weird combination, because it's a simple, sweet little fairytale, and it's crazy and out-there and making fun of and taking apart sci-fi, 'Star Wars', and 'Star Trek'.
Mel Brooks
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Being short never bothered me for three seconds. The rest of the time I wanted to commit suicide.
Mel Brooks
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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
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I was out in the combat engineers. We would throw up bridges in advance of the infantry but mainly we would just throw up.
Mel Brooks
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Dom DeLuise was a big man in every way. He was big in size and created big laughter and joy.
Mel Brooks
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Not only should we laugh about Hitler. We must laugh about him. Especially in Berlin.
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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Being brave is being scared and worried and still doing it [what you do]. Because if you're just a wacko, a mashugana, a crazy guy, then you're not brave, your nuts!
Mel Brooks
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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
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I only direct in self-defense.
Mel Brooks
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I love [Nikolai] Gogol's great eye for idiot behavior. Gogol said that life is so tragic, so stupendously sad that we'd better laugh a lot and enjoy ourselves. You either get a sense of humor going or you go under.
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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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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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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If you're quiet, you're not living. You've got to be noisy and colorful and lively.
Mel Brooks
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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
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In every spoof I make real love to the things I am spoofing.
Mel Brooks
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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
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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
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Oh, I'm not a true genius. I'm a near genius. I would say I'm a short genius. I'd rather be tall and normal than a short genius.
Mel Brooks