Mel Brooks Writing Quotations

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Everything starts with writing. And then to support your vision, your ideas, your philosophy, your jokes, whatever, you've gotta perform them and/or direct them, or sometimes just produce them.

No creative writer knows what is commercial and what isn't. You just write from your heart, you write from the deepest, creative urges in you, and you write from your soul, and you just either get lucky or not.

Everything starts with writing.

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.

You're young forever when you write. Alfred Hitchcock directed until the day he died. As long as you don't have any dementia or Alzheimer's, if you have your All-Bran every day and clear yourself out, I think your brains are gonna be all right.

Writing is simply one thought after another dying upon the one before.

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.

I love writing songs. I'm a songwriter.