“As far as how much you listen to the audience, you listen to them when they really hate something.”

Blazing Saddles’ is one of the funniest movies ever made.

I gotta say – if I clicked on a movie interview, and the first part was all about Walt Whitman, I’d love that article.

In general, the final filter of Hollywood is for-profit. Nothing goes through unless it can make money.

Dave Herman as Michael Bolton is one of my favorite performances ever.

So you’re doing that the first two or three screenings, and then finally, you dial the movie in and it’s working, and at that point, it’s 50/50 as far as what’s funny and what’s working.

“Firewall” seems both scary and protective at the same time. And how often does that happen within one word besides “military” and “government?”

My mom then got Pell Grants, put herself through college to get a degree to get a better job. Because we were broke, I then had to go to a state school.

I think that the job of art and culture is to jump on that time and realize that it’s there and to push it just a little bit faster.

This was the definition in Webster’s up until 1987 when a corporation bought Webster’s and changed it to exclude any mention of corporations.

Hardly socialism. In fact, it was a Republican plan to begin with.

We’re always looking for the backbone, the central idea, and once you have that you know everything can circle around it.

It so happens that America, according to all the polls that are out there, is pretty progressive. So you’re not going to see messages that support Ayn Randian individualism at the cost of the whole, because most people don’t agree with that.

Hollywood is for-profit, is what Hollywood is. All the studios are owned by big, megacorporations that are the furthest thing from liberal you can possibly imagine.

I’ve gotten like five laughs in movies, just off guy hugs.

It’s one thing to break stuff and damage people’s possessions, but when you start aiming at the ideology of America, that’s dangerous comedy.

Sometimes you’ll put something in and it will just die so hard that it’ll almost kill the movie.

Maybe the actors that used to turn down William Goldman’s scripts – where he wanted them to stretch and grow, and he was mad at ’em, and said, “Why won’t they be a real actor?” – maybe they just knew their audience. It’s too bad.

Drawing is the most inalienable medium. It is private; it practically doesn’t have an audience in mind, just the artist’s expression.

Finally, it is the communicating link between the screen and the audience, reaching out and enveloping all into one single experience.

The American audience, having been exposed to a narrowing range of ideas over the decades, often assumes that what they see and hear in the major media is all there is.

The one thing about comedy, making it become a part of you, the audience loves it, because you become part of them.

Part of the success of the show is that the audience sees themselves in the characters, becomes the characters. The more they inhabit the characters, the more they see.

I think test screening works at its best when the audience knows what it’s getting.

I always intended to be light and open. I misjudged the American audience.