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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

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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
Always
Wind
Like
Talent
Neuroses
People
Small
Diminishes
Working
Neurosis
Bigs
Diminish
Easy
Talents
Find
Discovered
Hard
Combination

More quotes by 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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Immortality is a by-product of good work. Masterpieces are not for artists, they're for critics. Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together. My message to the world is 'Let's swing, sing, shout, make noise! Let's not mimic death before our time comes! Let's be wet and noisy!'
Mel Brooks
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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
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My mother is very short - four-eleven. She could walk under tables and never hit her head.
Mel Brooks
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Woody Allen is a genius. His films are wonderful. He's poetic, but he's also a critic. He artfully steps back from a social setting and criticizes it without - I suspect - without letting himself be vulnerable to it.
Mel Brooks
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Bad taste is simply saying the truth before it should be said.
Mel Brooks
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My brothers went to work at 12 and put themselves through school and brought the family out of ruin into food and clothing.
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As far as songwriters, I've always been a fan of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and George Gershwin those guys mean a lot to me.
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He who hesitates is poor.
Mel Brooks
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I'm still a horse that can run. I may not be able to win the Derby, but what do you do when you retire? People retire and they vegetate. They go away and they dry up.
Mel Brooks
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Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together.
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 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
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If God wanted us to fly, He would have given us tickets.
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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Anybody can direct, but there are only eleven good writers.
Mel Brooks
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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
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You got to be brave. If you feel something, you've really got to risk it.
Mel Brooks
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In every spoof I make real love to the things I am spoofing.
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That's it baby, if you've got it, flaunt it.
Mel Brooks