Top 80 Albert Brooks Quotes

As an actor, if you’re just sitting and staring and you don’t know who you are in your own mind, it’s vacant. And sometimes the camera is an X-ray machine, it can pick it up.

One thing about Los Angeles is it feels like it’s not new. It feels like it’s already been built, and it’s deteriorating, except for the places they’re trying to make nicer. But in general, you drive all through the city, and the city feels like it was new a long time ago.

I think I present a different side of a male character: a side that is not John Wayne-like, a side that is, in fact, destructible. To some people, that is refreshing, and to other people, especially if they don’t know me, it may be disturbing.

Normally movies have the same people they use over and over for everything. It’s called typecasting. They don’t like to take chances. They’ll go with the guy they had before.

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.

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.

I can’t not put humor in a book.

I don’t know how, where, and why the idea for ‘Defending Your Life’ began; the idea had been bouncing around for a while. Stories like that sort of have to bounce. They don’t come out of nowhere. I went through my own period of life with sort of everything turning upside down, and wondering, ‘Why is it this way?’

The idea behind ‘Defending Your Life’: Imagine if you had to sit in a courtroom and watch your life. I don’t care who you are – if you committed a crime and you had to have all of your emails searched and made public, who on this planet could survive that? Nobody.

I’m not Elvis. I don’t get chased by paparazzi.

I’ve done performances in movies that I was immensely proud of and the movies didn’t take off like a rocket at Cape Canaveral, it didn’t take off.

I’m a strong fellow.

I had done about 60 television shows, from ‘Ed Sullivan’ to ‘The Hollywood Palace,’ before I ever went to ‘Johnny Carson.’ At the time, that was the showcase for comics. And I couldn’t believe it.

I don’t think the goal is, ‘How big a star did you ever become?’ I think the goal is, ‘Were you able to express yourself?’ And if you’re able to say yes, in any field, you’ve won. If you paint, write, do mosaics, knit – if it’s solving that part of your brain saying, ‘I need to do this,’ you’ve won.

I’ve heard people say, ‘There are no bad audiences,’ but that’s just not true. There are people who just shouldn’t be together in a room, who produce a really bad audience.

Wouldn’t it be great if cars came equipped with screens like that thing they have in Times Square that spells out the news? You could punch out your own instant messages: ‘Will the small red car with the ugly driver please stay a little further behind?’

I take anything other than ‘you big pig!’ as a compliment.

When I audition, I understand what it takes and the insecurities that come with it. If I do anything, I put actors at ease. I used to tell directors who weren’t actors, the best thing they could do was take an acting class for a couple of months. Just to understand.

My dad died right after performing at the Friars’ roast for Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. I have that tape somewhere. There’s still a lot of good jokes in there. I mean, that was 1958.

I’ve always liked to think ahead. Not stupid-far ahead. A hundred years doesn’t interest me. But 20 years interests me, and more for what happens to humans as opposed to things.

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.

It’s better to be known by six people for something you’re proud of than by 60 million for something you’re not.

Well, you know, with every character, if you’re going to expose yourself, you’ve got to figure out every detail that you’re going to play. So there’s no character that you can just go put on his shirt and be fully prepared.

I’m really fond of ‘Real Life’ because I think it anticipated a whole movement. And people forget, they talk about ‘Spinal Tap,’ but that wasn’t… this was a mockumentary a long time before that. It was one of the early, early sort of mockumentaries.

If your last name is Christ, don’t name your son Jesus.

I’m not interesting enough on my own that you’d want to see a film about me.

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.

In my screenplays – from the very beginning I’ve always used tape. I talk my screenplays. And then have somebody transcribe them.

I’ve always been the king of silence. I’ve always been a minimalist comedian. I’ve taken my influence from Jack Benny, who was the king of that… I’ve always done ‘less is more.’

I studied acting at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh because I figured a good comedian certainly could act.

If I start a film of my own, then what I eliminate is acting in other people’s movies. Because once I start, and I go raise the money, it’s about two and a half or three years, and I can’t stop. I have people hired. I can’t say, ‘Ooh there’s a good part called ‘Drive’; I’ll see you in three months.’

It’s interesting when you’re part of a group – the Jews, to be exact – that the world has had such problems with.

I’m not a big fan of the post-Armageddon stories, where Denzel Washington is walking around in a torn coat.

I probably learned, being in ‘Taxi Driver’ before I made my first film, I would come to the set every day just to watch how that film came about. It’s like a graduate course: it’s terrific. You talk to the cinematographer during the breaks. You ask the electrician why they are doing this.

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

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.

I guess I was the class clown – with a name like Albert Einstein, you don’t hide in the back. I’d read the school bulletin to the class, and I’d add activities and make stuff up. It was good, a good 10 minutes every morning.

I’d still like to see ‘Survivor’ minus the planned show-biz parts. That would be the purest form of show business – I want to see someone so hungry that they eat somebody else’s foot.

‘Finding Nemo’ has spawned so many sort of emotions over the years. I don’t even know that you could really understand exactly what parents and kids are seeing in it, but they can see a lot of different stuff.

If you paint, write, do mosaics, knit – if it’s solving that part of your brain saying, ‘I need to do this,’ you’ve won.

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.

What’s interesting about books that take place in the future, even twenty years in the future, is that many of them are black or white: It’s either a utopia or it’s misery. The real truth is that there’s going to be both things in any future, just like there is now.

I like movies about failing.

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.’

I don’t think the goal is, ‘How big a star did you ever become?’ I think the goal is, ‘Were you able to express yourself?’

How many people didn’t get a part who would have been better than the person who got the part? Thousands.

You know, I became a director out of necessity. I was writing comedies, and I couldn’t find anybody to deliver it correctly.

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.

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.

Twitter is the Devil’s playground.

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.

The people on this planet that are trying to live their life, that aren’t trying to destroy things, are in the 99.9-percent majority.

I like the acting. It’s how I started, and I sort of feel that if I don’t give it a little shot now, and I go back, then I’m pretty much done with it. I mean, at what age am I going to do it at? Although, when you see Christopher Plummer and Max von Sydow doing it, I guess the answer is 80.

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.