85 Quotes by Carl Reiner

I write books that way - I put a first line down and say, "Where does this go?"

People have a comic bent or an angularity to their thinking, and those are the people who make jokes. And it's usually people who were in an environment, when they were young, where jokes were at a premium, or at least considered important to a life. My parents always listened to the comedy radio shows, we went to the comedy movies, and my parents appreciated comedy. So kids listen and follow what their parents like.

Comedians are really writers who don't have pens and pencils about them, but they riff.

I certainly have warm relationships with people, but you choose the people you have those relationships with. There are some people I don't bother with.

When you denigrate people, they have two ways to fight back - with their fists and guns, or their mouths. And mouths are seemingly the easiest way to not get hit back. If people are laughing, they're not going to hit you.

You'd only write what you know and what you know is what you do and the people you know. So you'd write about them or the people you have met casually. It's part of your life.

Id like to acknowledge three people who early on knew Mel Brooks was one of the funniest people in the world: Sid Caesar, me, and Mel Brooks.

Improvisation is just writing in front of an audience.

I was a Teletype operator in the army, so that's where I learned to type. One day, I went downstairs to see if I could still type - I hadn't done it for four or five years after the war. So I typed out a page and I showed it to my wife and she said, "Where did you get this?" I said I wrote it. "You wrote this?" It was something very funny. I went and wrote another page, another couple of pages, and by the time I was finished I had 13 little short stories, humorous short stories.