Albert Brooks

“I'm not Elvis. I don't get chased by paparazzi.”

“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?'”

“'Drive' came to me because the casting director knew my manager and called and said, 'You've always talked to me about Albert wanting to play the heavy. I think he should read this.' My ears just perked up.”

“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 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 I'm going to act in someone's movie, I want the movie to be interesting and be able to get a couple of solid doubles.”

“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.”

“My friend Harry Nilsson used to say the definition of an artist was someone who rode way ahead of the herd and was sort of the lookout. Now you don't have to be that, to be an artist. You can be right smack-dab in the middle of the herd. If you are, you'll be the richest.”

“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.'”

“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.”

“The first act is writing, the second act is filming, the third act is releasing. If you have to partake in the third act, it hurts the first act of the next one. It's like a prizefight. You get punched.”

“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 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.”

“Nobody will leave any place unless they're forced out. That's the nature of humans. Once you're there, you're there. I've never seen anybody get up voluntarily and leave any place.”

“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.”

“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.'”

“Twitter is the Devil's playground.”

“Steven Spielberg seems to have wanted to be a director from 13. He put his dog in a certain position and made him eat at four o'clock. He liked to direct it. But, to me, directing is tedious. Especially if you're acting in it. And I'm inherently lazy.”

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

“'2001' is a really interesting movie because it came out in 1968, and everybody thought that that was possible, and look how ridiculous that was. We don't have ships like that, and you know, nobody in 1968 was going, 'Oh, that'll never happen!' But of course it never happened. We're not even close to it.”