Albert Brooks Quotes

When I was at youth theatre and drama school, I never thought people would mistake me for a stand-up.

With sitcom writing, you're trying to write stories.

I always enjoyed writing. I did playlets in high school, I did radio shows in college. That's one of the reasons I went down to Second City, because you could do acting and writing.

I always felt that it was easier to take a funny person and teach them to write television than to take somebody who was a television writer and make them funny. And I discovered a lot of great writers that went on to do a lot of great shows like 'Seinfeld,' 'Friends,' you know, 'Three and a Half Men.'

Stand-up has the best writers, because it's the hardest writing by a million miles.

I used to write bits and pieces of comedy material for various comics that were at the Windmill... as well as my film job, I was under contract, I was allowed to do that and everything.

I would love the opportunity to create my own program. I feel like a TV show with a format of monologue with lots of sketches thrown in could be really fun. But you know, that may never happen. Minimally, I just want to keep making stand-up.

When I was in high school I saw Steven Wright, a brilliant one-liner comedian, and I thought: 'That's what I should do; I should write one-liners.' And I did. My first album is mostly one-liners.

I'm good at coming up with wacky characters and funny dialogue.

I'm very driven by writing. Coming from 'Saturday Night Live,' because it's such a writing job, and we all write our parts on the show and create characters, I'm so respectful of good writing.

The hardest thing to write is sitcom.

I'm not sure what my material would have been if I'd have started earlier. I probably would have started with 'Damsels in Distress' kinds of films because that's the kind of comedy I was writing in college. So I didn't really have any life experience to work off of.

In the U.K. I'm probably better known as a comedy writer - or certainly that's my background is in writing comedy.

If you can't write your own material, you have very little chance of making it as a comedian.

I love to write humor. If I could make a living doing it that is all I would write.

I started out being a stand up and writing my own material. That took me to Talk Soup, where I was writing and performing for TV. So everything is all the same job in my eyes, and I don't want to ever give up any part of it. I will say that stand-up is my first love; it's how I got started and is in my bones.

To succeed in comedy you ultimately have to put in the hours and get lucky - The amount of people who are able to break through is so small a fraction of the amount of people trying.

There are tons of things I'd love to do. I want to do comedy. It's not that I don't want to play a superhero, but I got to play Conan and Drogo.

I think comedy is difficult, and I'm amazed so many people want to do it. I'll be buying jeans and somebody will say, "I'm a comedian" - the guy selling you the jeans. The desire to be a comedian is weird. I found it weird myself to want to be one; I was a schoolboy when I wanted to be one but I didn't know how to do it. That was 50 years ago, so times have changed greatly. There seems to be a long line of people desperate to do it and most of them are quite good.

I got into comedy because I wanted to get into writing.

When you're a comic, it's like being born gay. It's what you want to do every night when your other friends are out at night going to parties.

I like to read, but otherwise I'm just your average, self-obsessed comedian. It's pretty much all I think about.

When I went into Bobby's World, I had no idea it would be a success. I had been doing the Bobby voice as part of my nightclub adult act for years.

I think both of us [ with Steve Oram], once we decided to do comedy, knew that we would have to come to London to do that.

I'm sure that people who have been tweeting funny things have ended up on writing staffs of a late night show.