- [in 1985] I'd like to produce, direct, write, score, and star in a film in exactly the way [Charles Chaplin] did. I'll do that before I'm thirty.
- Every bad decision I've made has been based on money. I grew up in the projects and you don't turn down money there. You take it, because you never know when it's all going to end. I made [Beverly Hills Cop III (1994)] because they offered me $15 million. That $15 million was worth having Roger Ebert's thumb up my ass.
- I started out as an impressionist and that's all about observing - how people move, their voice quality, their attitudes and quirks.
- [on why he accepted a part in Best Defense (1984)] The door opened and four guys came in carrying a check.
- That's my idol, Elvis Presley. If you went to my house, you'd see pictures all over of Elvis. He's just the greatest entertainer that ever lived. And I think it's because he had such presence. When Elvis walked into a room, Elvis Presley was in the fucking room. I don't give a fuck who was in the room with him---[Humphrey Bogart], Marilyn Monroe.
- If you're involved in with something that's original, you know, you'll always go back and try to rehash it.
- The advice I would give to someone is to not take anyone's advice.
- I keep telling people I'll make movies until I'm fifty and then I'll go and do something else. I'm going to be a professional gentleman of leisure.
- The only reason I did Showtime (2002) was Robert De Niro. I definitely consider him to be in the top 5 all time best actors.
- [on rumours he will play The Riddler in the next Batman movie] I would love to be in one of those Batman movies. Jim Carrey did The Riddler once and he did a wonderful job. Egghead, I could be Egghead.
- [on Dan Aykroyd] Robotic the way he handles people: "Ah, yes, good to meet you." Very straightforward, very clean-cut, very polite, real nice guy.
- [on Richard Pryor, Charles Chaplin, Bill Cosby and George Carlin being his greatest influences] I feel like those are the most brilliant comic minds ever. You can draw a line from them to anyone who's trying to do comedy - or just be funny - today, including me.
- I know what I'm capable of doing and what I'm capable of not doing. To be perfectly honest, I'm a little afraid of doing a straight dramatic film. I'm not saying I couldn't do it. I'm saying I'm afraid to. Everyone is afraid of failure.
- With the success that I've had and the money that I make, if I and a white man went out to get a cab together, the cab wouldn't stop for me. It would stop for the white man.
- [on why he lost his trademark laugh] I don't laugh like that anymore, somehow it doesn't come out. It's weird to change something that's as natural as that. But it started out as a real laugh, then it turned into people laughing because they thought my laugh was funny, and then there were a couple of times where I laughed because I knew it would make people laugh. Then it got weird. People came up to me and said, "Do that laugh," or if you laugh, someone turns around and goes, "Eddie?" I just stopped doing it.
- [on what his younger self would think of his family films] Would the 27-year-old have wondered what I was doing in Doctor Dolittle (1998)? No. Or in those Shrek (2001) movies? No. But, you know, both the 27-year-old and the 48-year-old was like, "Why am I in Imagine That (2009)?" The movie didn't have a chance at the box office - it's just me and this little girl and a blanket.
- [on being the biggest star from Saturday Night Live (1975)] That's only because John Belushi's dead. Belushi's like Spanky of the Little Rascals series. I guess that makes me Stymie, but that's cool. I'll be Stymie. Think of all the people who came off that show. I bet you could figure out the combined grosses of people who came off Saturday Night Live in the movies - me, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, Mike Myers, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd. I bet it's $15 billion. It's no coincidence - that show's like Harvard for a comic actor. When you come off the show and get into the movie business, it's like you're moving in slow motion for a couple of years. You've been working like a crazy person in a pressure cooker, then you're in the movies, just sitting in your trailer.
- [on returning to stand-up comedy] If I ever get back onstage, I'm going to have a really great show for you all - an hour and a half of stand-up and about 40 minutes of my shitty band. But I don't know. The way that used to come about, you'd be around the house, hanging out, say something funny and it'd be like, "I'm going to go to the club, try that out tonight." That still happens, but it's been a long time. I'm not that guy in the leather suit anymore. The hardest thing for comics nowadays is to find your fucking voice.
- [on his legacy] Technology has it to where they gonna play this stuff forever. But the reality is, all this shit turns into dust, everything is temporary. No matter what you do, if you're around here long enough, you'll wind up dribbling and shitting on yourself, and you won't even remember the shit you did. I saw this documentary on Ronald Reagan, and it was like, "Whoa." They say he came into the house, and he had the toy White House that he had taken out of a fish tank, and he goes, "I don't know what I'm doing with this, but I know it has something to do with me." He had even forgotten he was the president. No matter what you do, that shit is all getting turned into gobbledygook. In 200 years, it's all dust, and in 300 years, it ain't nothing, and in 1,000 years, it's like you wasn't even fucking here. But if you're really, really lucky, if you really did something special, you could hang around a little longer.
- [on Charlie Murphy] We were so different that people would see us and be like, "Y'all are brothers? I didn't know you was brothers." And Charlie was in gangs, and even now, Charlie's like extra ultramacho - piranha, pit bulls, hatchets, axes, machetes. He has a black belt in karate. I got through a lot of school because the kids knew I was his brother, nobody was fucking with me. "You don't fuck with Eddie, his brother will kill you." Charlie was a really tough guy.
- [on scripts he receives] They'll come to you with this stuff, dialogue like "Hey, jive turkey!" Like, "you can play this irate black man." I'm going, "Hey, you have a script?" "No, that's it, you're angry with society and you beat up a Mafia person and you're friends with Drew Barrymore." It's like they had to throw in a white person there.
- [in 1982, about Saturday Night Live (1975)] If I don't die in a plane crash or something, this country has a rare opportunity to watch a great talent grow.
- [2015] I'm not doing anything unless the script's incredible. I did some movies where they offer you a bunch of money and you go, "OK, I'll do it!" I've done enough of those - I don't have to do them any more.
- [2015] I just finished a movie. But it's not a comedy. It's called Mr. Church (2016), directed by Bruce Beresford. I hadn't done a movie in five years; I'd been waiting for something really special. Then this thing came along. It got me off the couch. It's about a man who's hired to cook for a dying woman for six months and becomes part of the family. You'll be hearing about it.
- [His high school yearbook quote] In reality, all men are sculptors, constantly chipping away the unwanted parts of their lives, trying to create their idea of their masterpiece.
- [on the hits and misses on his career] I kind of see it from a different perspective than the way you guys [journalists] may see it. In my view, I've never had a flop movie or a movie that didn't work. If I did the movie, and they paid me lots and lots of money to do it, it's a f-ing smash!". "Any movie that I was in that they paid me a lot of money for was a f-ing smash. And, to be perfectly honest, we celebrate Pluto Nash at my house. We don't have Christmas Day, we have Pluto Nash Day. And we don't have Halloween, we have Vampire in Brooklyn (1995)."
- Well, I don't think the New Yorker will be singing the praises of Meet Dave (2008). "That was a gem!" I don't know if there's some "Pluto Nash" Appreciation Club out there. The Friends of "Holy Man" Group. The "Vampire in Brooklyn" Club.
- I haven't read a review in, easily, 20, 25 years. I used to. I remember when Coming to America (1988) came out, Siskel and Ebert gave it two thumbs way down, saying it sucked. Then 10, 15 years later, I remember seeing them do a retrospective and they were both, "The classic 'Coming to America' blah blah blah.' The shelf life of movies changes over the years.
- [1990] I don't think people are fascinated with me. I'm just a funny guy, and people enjoy my movies. I make them laugh. And that's as far as it goes. This is the deal: A guy wants to see a movie with his girlfriend. He'll say, "Let's go see this horror movie." And the girl will go, "No, let's go see a Tom Cruise movie," and the boyfriend doesn't want to see that because Cruise is too handsome. So they settle on my movie. The girls go to see Cruise by themselves; the guys see the horror movies by themselves; but you go to my movie on a date. I'm not a threat; I make you laugh.
- [1990] When [John Belushi] died, I thought, "What a waste", basically. Thirty-three years old and dead from some fucking cocaine. It's stupid, man. All that shit is stupid. People die really young. If I croak in an airplane crash, it's fate. Nobody can call me stupid. These people who croak from drugs in their thirties and forties, before they've even lived, are killing *themselves*. Belushi was a baby. Elvis Presley, as much as he lived, he was a baby when he died - forty-two years old, man! Stupid! Freddie Prinze. I feel some sympathy, but then the other side of me goes, "Jesus Christ, that's so fucking stupid!".
- [1990, on the Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) helicopter accident and his not attending John Landis's trial] I don't want to say who was guilty or who was innocent. But if you're directing a movie and two kids get their heads chopped off at fucking twelve o'clock at night when there ain't supposed to be kids working, and you said, "Action!" then you have some sort of responsibility. So my principles wouldn't let me go down there and sit in court. That's just the way I am. If somebody in my family was guilty of something, I wouldn't sit there for them in a courtroom and say, "You've got my support." Fuck that. The most it would be is, "Hey, you go work that out. I still love ya; I'm still your friend."
- [1990, on John Landis's directing Coming to America (1988)] I wanted to help out Landis. I figured I'd give this guy a shot because his career was fucked. But he wound up fucking me. As it turned out, John always resented that I hadn't gone to his Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) trial. I never knew that; I thought we were cool. But he'd been harboring it for a year. Every now and then, he would make little remarks, like, "You didn't help me out; you don't realize how close I was to going to jail." I never paid any mind.
- My legacy is my children. My work, this is just what I do. My legacy is my 10 children.
- You get born only once in this business, but you can die again and again.
- I could have done a bunch of movies where I stayed as the Axel Foley or Reggie Hammond persona. But I didn't want to be doing the same thing all the time. Every now and then, you crash and burn, but that's part of it.
- [About making The Nutty Professor]: I had a bunch of movies that didn't work. People were saying, "Eddie's not good," so I was like, "Not good? Let me show you what I can fucking do. I'll do something where I play all these different characters."
- [About making Vampire in Brooklyn]: The only way I was able to do Nutty Professor and to get out of my Paramount deal, I had to do Vampire in Brooklyn. But you know what ruined that movie? The wig. I walked out in that longhaired wig and people said, "Oh, get the fuck out of here! What the hell is this?
- I've been making movies for so long that now it's all just one body of work. If you have a flop movie, so what? And if you have a hit movie, it's "so what," too, it's on to the next movie. If I do something and I die in it, at least I took a chance.
- There was a period where I was doing these s-ty movies and repeating myself. Golden Child was half-assed. So were Harlem Nights, Another 48 HRS., Beverly Hills Cop II - you know which movies. I realized, 'Wait a second. I got to be true to myself as an artist, I'll only do stuff I have a passion about.' When I came to that conclusion, it was all easy again."
- About Janet Jackson: She always smells like she just jumped out of the shower. See how pretty her smile is? She smells the way her smile looks. It's the smell of inner beauty. And when she smiles so big, it's just so warm.
- In the 80s, I was like, 'I don't want to be known for a laugh.' That's all [impersonators] did was that laugh...It was like, 'Hey, you know what, I'm going to stop laughing.' I forced myself to stop laughing, which is really an unnatural thing. You laugh, and it's like, 'I have to stop laughing like that.' And now I don't laugh like that anymore.
- I never take the audience into consideration. I'm like, "This is what I'm doing." If the audience likes it, great, and if they don't like it, everything isn't for everybody.
- I used to call movies flops. There's no such thing as a flop. Because I've been in this business long enough to know that when I got into this business, there was no Black Hollywood, and there was just, you know, a handful of Black people that were working in films. Just to get in a movie is an accomplishment.
- I remember the first time we watched "Pluto Nash," I had my son Myles with me. He was probably about 8. Myles is sitting there with me, and the movie's all soft. Then at the end, it goes silent, and my little baby son goes, "Corny." That was challenging. Even the baby knows it's corny.
- The process of making a movie, it's work. The actual being in a scene, that's a small part of the day. I love that - when we're on the set and you feel it clicking. But "hurry up and wait": That's the movie business, and it is not fun.
- I like a day where there's nothing, and I can hear my kids, wherever they're at, and I sit around and do nothing, play guitar.
- After "48 Hrs." Marlon Brando calls my agent and wants to meet me. Now I look back and go, "Wow, that's crazy: The greatest actor of all time wants to have dinner with you!" But back then I just thought, Well, that's the way it is: You make a movie, and Marlon Brando calls.
- I like "Bowfinger," but I could think of 20 other actors that could have played that role. I can't think of another person that could do "Nutty Professor."
- I don't think of myself as a comedian at all. That's one aspect of who I am. I just see myself as an artist. I'm a supersensitive artist, and I can express myself creatively in a bunch of different ways.
- [About the amount of good movies he made on his career]: I have more than five good ones, though. I feel like I have maybe five or six bad ones. You know, "Pluto Nash" might be the only [expletive] movie. I have a couple of movies that are soft, and movies that are just OK. But no flops.
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