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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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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
Song
Highlights
Look
Rhythm
Looks
Carry
Giving
Musical
Usually
Gives
Start
Words

More quotes by 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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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
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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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Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin.
Mel Brooks
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Judd Apatow is pretty good, both as a producer and as a director.
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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Immortality is a by-product of good work.
Mel Brooks
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These men both publicly and privately have done so much for me. Without Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick I would be living in a little motel just around the corner here, trying to make ends meet.
Mel Brooks
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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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Being short never bothered me for three seconds. The rest of the time I wanted to commit suicide.
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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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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My brothers went to work at 12 and put themselves through school and brought the family out of ruin into food and clothing.
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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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.
Mel Brooks
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If God wanted us to fly, He would have given us tickets.
Mel Brooks
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Humor is just another defense against the universe.
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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He who hesitates is poor.
Mel Brooks
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We rest our case on the production numbers.
Mel Brooks