Quotes from Albert Brooks

Even if you didn't see the movie, you'd see two words you'd never seen put together before - comedy and Muslim. Comedy is friendly - it's the least offensive word in our language.

My audience has lots of people between 20 and 35, but there are always a few 60-year-olds, and it makes me happier than if everyone was 22.

By the way, movies are like sporting events in that you're as good as the movie you're in. You can sit in a room for 20 years and go do a movie and you can just kill in it and you move to the head of the line again. By the same token, you can do five movies a year and if they're dreck, it's nothing.

You know, when cameras are rolling, improvisation doesn't feel natural. The pressure is too great. You're on a time schedule. You've got 60 crewmen.

Basically, I still have the privacy that all celebrities crave, except for those celebrities who feel that privacy reflects some kind of failure on their part.

I like to do things that I want to see myself. With 'Defending Your Life,' I wanted to see some aspect of death other than angels and the thing that 'Ghost' was about, because that didn't make any sense to me. So that's the reason: it fills a hole.

I can't not put humor in a book.

Most entertainment is trying to get you. It's tested, like toothpaste.

I just like making people laugh, and buried in that I like to bring up topics and start discussions.

There are a few giant companies that I love, and I love Amazon. Their customer service is impeccable: sometimes, just for the hell of it, I'll sleep on a mattress for three years and return it.

I attempt to create a form of seriocomic entertainment to either delight, enlighten, or disgust, whichever you'd like. In terms of making motion pictures, I write and direct and act. I guess you'd say I'm a filmmaker.

Listen, there are some movies that are set in stone and the writer or the director does not want to change, but I've never worked on a movie, including my own, that didn't take advantage of a rehearsal process.

If you want to be a writer, just write. There's no magic to it.

In the course of my movies, the financing and the releasing were always the tough part. Because I loved the creative; I loved the writing. I loved the making of it. Because, I guess, I never had the giant blockbuster, I never got that sort of ease for the next one.

Once you sign on as an actor, you know, you don't go to the editing room, you don't see how they cut, you don't see how they score, you don't see how they cast the rest of the movie.

I've been doing comedy since I was two. You know, kids who make other kids laugh. The sickness had set in! I could make my friends' parents laugh; I had a sense of what was silly and funny.

I made my living in comedy, but I'm not a silly person. I've got all these sides to me. Even in my movies that I've written myself, the characters sometimes border on great anger or nutsiness or other kinds of behavior. I'm not just doing fart jokes for two hours.

I wrote this book, '2030,' and I was careful in the book not to overdo the future because I don't think it comes that fast.

My dad played a character on the radio called 'Parkyakarkus.' A Greek-dialect comedian. He did Friars' roasts and wrote material and made people laugh that way. But he wrote his own shows with other writers.

If you don't succeed on your own ground, then there's no reason to succeed. Unless, of course, you really want a boat. If you're a person who feels that with a yacht, everything will be all right, then you should do whatever you have to and get the yacht.

There've been a few mother-daughter movies that are somewhat realistic. But the mother-son movies are more comical than realistic: 'Throw Momma from the Train,' 'Stop! or My Mom Will Shoot.' You don't sit in the dark and go, 'Oh my God, that's my mother.'

When I went to acting school, the kids that got the best grades were the kids that could cry on cue. But it didn't really translate into careers for any of them, because the external is the easy part.

My mom was a professional. My dad and mom met each other in a movie called 'New Faces of 1937.' My mom went under the name Thelma Leeds, and she did a few movies, and she was really a great singer, and when she married my dad and started to have a family, she sang at parties.

It's funny: in the middle of making 'The Muse,' I was offered, at the time, the first 'Ice Age,' the part that Ray Romano took: I was offered the elephant. And I couldn't even stop to breathe, so I didn't do it. They've made, like, six of them. And in the animation business, for a voice actor, that's what you want. You want six, you know?