Albert Brooks Quotes (18 Quotes)

If we had 3 million exhibitionists and only one voyeur, nobody could make any money.

After September 11, I sat in my house for a year and I was scared. In that first year, all that was happening was that the next one was coming tomorrow, maybe this weekend, maybe on Monday. That entire year, everybody was panicked. The second year, the attacks were going to come on the holidays. Be careful on July 4th. I wouldn't go to Times Square on New Year's Eve. The third year, we're not sure it's going to come, but what they kept telling us is that this is never going away, right One day I thought that this is insane What is our life like We're going to hide until we're killed You want to get back to a normalcy, even if there is some impending doom, and normalcy in my mind is to be able to deal with it, in a motion picture comedy. There have been no comedies about this, certainly not from America. The comedies that have been made that take place in the present are generally these teenage sex comedies that never talk about the world, so they're not going to deal with it. So what are you going to do I just thought that I want to find a way to just get in this door, just to be able to stand up and say that I'm acknowledging the new world here. Maybe we can get a few laughs for 98 minutes, and then we'll go on.

There are a couple of images I really love in this movie. One is crossing into Pakistan illegally to see a group of guys who ordinarily you'd think would want to kill you, but they want to be stand-up comedians.

I come from the place where I am thinking 'I have put my blood on the pages.'

This was enormously challenging, because it involved filling 120 blank pages with an actual story and words people say.

I was allowed to film in the biggest mosque in India and when I told the imam the plot of the movie he started to laugh,

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

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.

if we actually find advanced life on another planet whether they'll be as obsessed with their own genitals as we are.

When we spoke, he told me, 'The Newsweek thing has changed the world.' And I said, 'Wasn't it 911 that changed the world' But Michael said he just didn't want to take a chance.

But I thought, what could I do in a teeny way -- and believe me, it's a teeny way -- to defuse this There had to be some way to separate the 1.5 billion people who don't want to kill us from the 100,000 or so who do. I thought if I could get five Muslims and six Hindus and maybe 3 Jews to laugh for 90 minutes, then I've accomplished something.

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.

I was in Kashmir last weekend. Went to visit one of my sweaters.

The whole world is tense. Everybody gets the international news. There's been no American comedy at all that even remotely addresses the subject in any way. My goal isn't to solve the world's problems. My character wasn't even able to do his assignment. But the premise of wanting to find out about somebody -- other than the stuff that the CIA will tell you -- there's no hope unless we do that.

Bullfights are hugely popular because you can sit comfortably with a hot dog and possibly watch a man die. It won't be me, but I can sit comfortably and watch it.

When I die, if the word 'thong' appears in the first or second sentence of my obituary, I've screwed up.

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

The world really changed after 911, not just in the tragic way, but in every way. So it took me a couple of years to even understand how my art form I could process any of this. When the world changed, eliciting laughter with subjects that were funny to me before 911 just didn't seem good enough.