Top 80 Brooks Quotes

My dad had a commercial film company, so he had a videotape player before anyone. So he got Mel Brooks movies or Citizen Kane or some classic old movies. And every summer the revival house in Evanston would show the great films from the ’50s and ’60s and ’70s.

I didn’t want to look distinguished; I wanted to look fun, and also to fade into the street, into the King’s Road. If I don’t fade into a room at White’s, that’s fine. My father was chairman of Brooks’ and the Beefsteak, and I was brought up in that life, and it bores me rigid.

Part of the great thing of looking back on how I went from the cattle ranch to the White House was, I was a country music DJ. I saw Garth Brooks perform for free in 1992 at the Colorado State Fair where I met this person who knew about this graduate school program.

And I love Mel Brooks. My Dad loved his movies, too, they’re awesome, the kind of thing that if you’re in for ten minutes, you’re in for two hours.

I got everything I wanted from my parents: Brooks Brothers sweaters and Spalding saddle shoes.

I was a huge Garth Brooks fan.

Every collaboration I do, I feel like I’ve benefitted in so many different ways; it all depends on the organization. With Moncler, there is such a heritage to the brand and to the way that they work. With Brooks Brothers, in the same way, having the heritage to draw from in that collaboration is invaluable.

I love sketch comedy. My real goal is to do something with Albert Brooks. That would be my fantasy. I stay up night and day thinking up stuff he might find funny.

The three theater peeps I would love to dine with are Mel Brooks, because he is so funny; Stephen Sondheim, because he is a god-like genius; and Ethel Merman, to compare notes on fabulous belting.

Albert Brooks. Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Larry David. The best comedic actors play broad and real simultaneously, coming across as both larger than life and all too human.

My favorite-ever version of ‘King Lear’ is the 1971 film by Peter Brooks. He has this enormous fur thing, and it adds enormous gravitas.

‘The Sword of Shannara’ is about two brothers who find themselves on an epic quest to save humanity. It borrows from ‘Lord of the Rings’ but is still original in its own right. I read it in three days, then reread it, then went out and found every single book Terry Brooks ever wrote, and read all those.

Whenever I’d go anywhere with my dad – in his 1980 burgundy Dodge Ram – he’d always listen to mix tapes of country-music stars like Garth Brooks, Clint Black and Willie Nelson. Those were the first songs I ever learned the words to.

I think Kenny Chesney or Garth Brooks would be the coolest duet partners. I look up to them so much for their work ethics.

I mean I would still love to be in Mel Brooks’ movies; he’s great.

In college, I started to get soaked in the materials. Subsequently, I worked with R.W.B. Lewis, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks on a history of American literature – I did that for seven or eight years. In the course of that work, my interest in Faulkner deepened and has been sustained ever since.

I’m reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from early in the last century.

The person who should really write an appreciation of the late great Dom DeLuise is Burt Reynolds, who, even more than Mel Brooks, made of the jolly, beanie wearing fat man a side-kick and a legend.

Jason Behr and Amanda Brooks were cool to work with. Jason and I are fast friends to this day.

And I had a big opportunity with Richard Brooks, The Professionals, which is really a magnificent movie.

You should have seen Willie Wells play shortstop: as good as Ozzie Smith and a better hitter. How I wish people could have seen Ray Dandridge play third base, as good as Brooks Robinson and Craig Nettles and all of those. He was bowlegged; a train might go through there, but not a baseball.

‘The Book of Love’ is the kind of James L. Brooks mainstream movie that the majors are ignoring.

I never stepped foot into a Brooks Brothers before ‘Mad Men.’

I would like Albert Brooks to have received the Oscars for best actor, best director and best screenplay for ‘Modern Romance.’ I love that movie.

A plump, well-fed stream is as satisfying to behold as a well-fed animal or a thrifty tree. One source of charm in the English landscape is the full, placid stream the season through; no desiccated watercourses will you see there, nor any feeble, decrepit brooks, hardly able to get over the ground.

I love, loved, loved ‘We Real Cool’ by Gwendolyn Brooks.

I was always a big fan of Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner’s ‘2000-Year-Old Man’ sketch. I think it’s one of the biggest influences on the podcast, definitely. You’d never say Carl Reiner was the funniest dude on there, because he’s just teeing it up, but he knows what questions to ask to lead to great improv.

I’ll shout out to James L. Brooks. ‘Terms of Endearment’ always makes me cry. Also, ‘Stepmom’ always makes me cry. I guess, you know, mothers dying. It’s a safe bet that I’m going to cry.

I’ve always dressed the same. I’ve never made a fashion mistake. I’ve always worn utilitarian. I started my collection because I wanted certain specific things, but before that it was vintage and classic Brooks Brothers.

Few have had the good fortune I have had. My start in the business was with people like Peter Brooks and Michael Redgrave. Also, growing up as I did with a father in the military taught me to accept discipline and responsibility.

Max Brooks’ novel ‘World War Z’ is one of the greatest zombie stories ever written, partly for reasons that make it basically unfilmable.

Brooks Ashmanskas – rehearsing and putting on a show can be very stressful and exhausting, but Brooks makes every moment a joyride. His influence taught me to never take myself or what I’m doing too seriously.

I’d like to be able to be like a director, like Richard Brooks, say. And be able to say, ‘I did my best, and this is it, and there’s nobody to blame but me.’

I don’t wear flip-flops, so my casual shoe is a Brooks Brothers tuxedo slipper!

I read a lot of literary theory when I was in graduate school, especially about novels, and the best book I ever read about endings was Peter Brooks’ ‘Reading for the Plot. ‘

I feel like I am campaigning door to door. You just can’t step out of a band like Brooks & Dunn and assume that it is just going to be business as usual. You have to work it. It does feel like a campaign where you would have Obama, Romney, or Newt beating the bushes right now. That’s what I’m having to do.

Preston Sturges is one of my favorites. I learned about dialogue and timing from him – louder, faster, funnier. But I do love Mel Brooks.

The most fun I ever had on a movie was working with Albert Brooks. He’s the caviar of comedy. I mean, nobody’s funnier; nobody is smarter than Albert Brooks.

The stupidest thing I ever did was turn down ‘Terms of Endearment’ to do ‘Cannonball Run II.’ Jim Brooks wrote the part of the astronaut for me. Taking that role would have been a way to get all the things I wanted.

Ill habits gather unseen degrees, as brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas.

I maybe need a break, because I feel like I’ve done every iteration of it, and that’s what’s been great, you know – ‘Mr. Brooks’ is so different from ‘Friday the 13th,’ which is so different from ‘The Crazies,’ which is different from ‘Piranha.’ So, I feel like I’ve kind of covered it across the board.

I have performed my one-man show ‘700 Sundays’ over 400 times now. There were only two times that I can honestly say I was nervous. The first was when I knew Mel Brooks was in the audience, and the second was when Sid Caesar came.

For a variety of reasons, my books struck the marketplace like a thunderclap; and one of those reasons was that there were so few alternatives available. Readers who loved Tolkien, and who were not satisfied by Terry Brooks, had nowhere else to turn.

Brooks Robinson belongs in a higher league.

I was offered ‘Pretty Woman.’ I was offered ‘Big’ and ‘Dead Poets Society.’ But what was important to me in those years was to make movies, to make these Albert Brooks movies.

During ‘Bullets Over Broadway,’ there was a part where we performed the ‘play within the play’ facing upstage. It was me, Karen Ziemba, Brooks Ashmanskas, and Marin Mazzie. I don’t think we got through it properly a single time.

Because of the Thames I have always loved inland waterways – water in general, water sounds – there’s music in water. Brooks babbling, fountains splashing. Weirs, waterfalls; tumbling, gushing.

I didn’t think I liked country music. Then I got into Garth Brooks.

The hardest I’ve ever laughed in a cinema was at ‘Silent Movie’ by Mel Brooks. I was 12-ish and I actually fell out of my seat. I saw it 10 years later hoping for the same hilarity but it didn’t happen. I’m not sure if that’s because of me or the film.

We grew up watching Woody Allen and Albert Brooks movies, and we see this neurotic, annoying, unlikeable male at the center of a story, and people root for him anyway. I think that’s really what we have been craving as women is the hero who doesn’t look perfect and doesn’t act perfectly.

I can take the steel guitars and fiddles off, we can make it a little more pop, cover ideas that are a little less cowboy. But you got to look at yourself in the mirror and ask, whose flag you are under? For Garth Brooks, I’m steel, fiddles, red, white and blue.