Al Yankovic Quotes

It's hard to really articulate what the parameters are that make one song parody-able and another song not, but if I can come up with a good enough idea for it, I go for it, and if not, then I have to move on.

You don't need to be defined by your job.

How can you get bored if the audience is cheering and laughing at something you're doing?

You can try on our suede underwear if you choose. Do what you want, but don't step on my blue suede shoes.

By the time I'm in the studio recording my parody, 10,000 parodies of that song are on YouTube.

I'm watching the charts every week and hoping something will pop into my head.

Until you came along I never dated anyone this low on the food chain.

I'd rather clean all the bathrooms in Grand Central Station with my tongue than spend one more minute with you.

I knew we were having problems when you put those piranhas in my bathtub again.

One of the hardest things I've had to deal with in my career is keeping my material topical even though I only release albums every three or four years.

If I could find the right kind of property, get tied in with the right movie, I'd love to be involved, but I just find it hard to be motivated to do another screenplay right now.

As a wise man once said, "April Fools Day is for amateurs. You NEVER need an excuse to mess with people's heads."

Got a brand new semi-automatic weapon with a laser sight. Oh, I'm praying that somebody tries to break in here tonight.

I suppose I had my rock star fantasies while I was singing into my hairbrush in the bathroom mirror, but I never really consciously said, 'OK, this is what I'm going to do for a living and I'm going to be Weird Al.'

If something is good enough, it can be out there and people will see it.

I like to think that I've gotten better at what I do. I spend more time and pay more attention to detail album after album. But pretty much it's stayed the same.

I don't really look at myself as the kind of person who craves attention, but I've never been to therapy so there's probably a lot of stuff about myself that I don't know.

I'm an ugly girl,
My face makes you hurl,
Sad I have it,
I should bag it.
Acne everywhere,
Unwanted facial hair.
I'm a relation to Frankenstein's creation.

So I'm one of the few celebrities that got to do a repeat performance on 'The Simpsons,' which I'm very flattered by.

I write and write and write, and then I edit it down to the parts that I think are amusing, or that help the storyline, or I'll write a notebook full of ideas of anecdotes or story points, and then I'll try and arrange them in a way that they would tell a semi-cohesive story.

There are a lot of songs that would ostensibly be a good candidate for parody, yet I can't think of a clever enough idea.

I'll be mellow when I'm dead.

I can't get too offended when somebody parodies me.

I don't think there are any new media I'd like to cover.

I have a long-standing history of respecting artists' wishes.

The irony is of course that my career has lasted a whole lot longer than some of the people I've parodied over the years.

I notice you're not wearing any... galloshes ;)

At this point I've got a bit of a track record. So people realize that when 'Weird Al' wants to go parody, it's not meant to make them look bad ... it's meant to be a tribute.

You got me stranded on the bungee tower of love.

In the '80s, I was the only game in town, I was the only one getting that kind of exposure in any rotation on MTV. Now with internet culture it seems like everyone is doing music parodies. And they're not all good!

I mean, I don't write for kids.

I mean, I hate to gloat, but I'm extremely satisfied with my position in life and the way things have worked out for me.

I've always known that if I recorded an album, it would come out, and people would enjoy it! Whereas if I wrote a movie script, chances are better than even that I'd just be another guy in L.A. with a movie script in his drawer.

I don't want to pooh-pooh modern pop. I appreciate that as well, but my personal favorite kind of music is guitar-based rock. I like grunge and garage bands and alternative music, but that's more my personal taste.

My own personal tastes don't really have an effect on whether song is a parody target or not. But having said that, I try to pick songs that I actually like because I realize that I have to live with these songs for a long time, from when I'm working on them in the studio to possibly playing them onstage for the rest of my life. So I try not to pick songs that I know would drive me crazy.

As it turns out, there is a thing called the Internet, and stuff does go out there whether the suits like it or not.

If you want to avoid heated arguments, never discuss religion, politics, or whether the toilet paper roll should go over or under.

Right now I'm listening to a lot of Top 40 music, because THAT'S MY JOB.

Beans, beans, the magic legumes - the more you ingest, the more you consume.

I do a lot of different things, sometimes at the same time, and it's very difficult to figure out where I fit.

If money can't buy happiness, then I guess I'll have to rent it.

Probably 90 percent of my albums have polka medleys.

When I swore that you're getting more and more beautiful everyday. Well, I was only kidding, honey.

People that were a little nerdy in high school would look up to me and know it gets better.

You slammed my face down on the barbecue grill, now my scars are all healing, but my heart never will.

Like, I have had moments, which I think most people have, where you'll be watching TV, and it'll be interrupted by some tragic event, and you'll actually find yourself thinking, 'I don't want to hear about this train being derailed! What happened to 'The Flintstones?'

It fit pretty nicely into my schedule because we'd pretty much finished the bulk of promotion for Mandatory Fun and were just getting geared up for the World Tour so this was a nice time for me to be working on it.

I can't say enough good things about my band. I feel very fortunate that I found them when I did, very early in my career. Not only are they just great, nice guys; they're some of the best musicians you're likely to find. They do everything from gangsta rap to polka music and every genre in between. It's amazing.

My personal taste doesn't enter into it a lot when I make my decisions as to what to parody.

He put Ben Gay inside my jock strap and filled my tooth paste tube up with glue.

I know I'm a million times as humble as thou art!

It becomes more important to me as time goes on to make every album the best thing I've ever done, so it's a lot of self-imposed pressure that also kind of slows me down a bit.

I know now that everything I write, I'm going to put out, and I'll have to live with it for the rest of my life.

Somebody will come up to me after a show and have me sign their arm, and the next time I see them my autograph has been permanently inscribed on their arm.

You fake something until you're good at it.

Nows the time to go for all the gusto you can grab. You'll have plenty of time to be low-key when you're laid out on the slab.

You can play some schlock like New Kids On the Block.

Well I've made no secret of my life long love of MAD Magazine, it's probably my first and greatest influence in terms of my comic sensibilities. I've known John [Ficarra] for many years, and we've been friends. About four or five months ago, at a dinner in New York, John made the very nice offer of my being guest editor for an issue of MAD and I thought about it for about half a nanosecond and decided that was a pretty good idea.

Ever since the day you left me, I've been so miserable, my dear. I feel almost as bad as I did when you were still here.

I'm still a geek on the inside, that's the important thing.

That's a big part of my life - doing things that I'm not prepared to do. Doing things that I don't know how to do, and keep doing them until I get good at them. I always try to put myself out of my comfort zone and out of my depth, and hopefully somewhere along the line I'll catch up.

In a genre where most of the artists are one-hit wonders, I've been able to hang around longer than most "serious" acts. I pride myself in being a very talented leech.

I'm a music fan, and I can listen to the radio, or music, without thinking, "How am I going to screw this up?" [Laughs] If I'm really actively trying to think of a parody, then I'll have my antenna out, and be a little more proactive about it.

Midget wrestling on channel 3, it costs me 50 bucks a month.

The music has always been my bread and butter, and I've focused more of my attention on that.

I did have a child, and I was reading a lot of picture books to her, but at the same time writing a children's book was something that I'd been wanting to do for many years, pretty much since the start of my career.

When I go to my live shows it's often a multigenerational audience, a family bonding experience.

It's hard to force creativity and humor.

I've done a movie and a TV series, and someday I'd like to do a successful movie and a successful TV series. That would be nice.

I cut my teeth playing rock songs on the accordion when I was a teenager and my friends always thought that was extremely amusing. I think that was the genesis of my polka medleys, because every rock song I played on the accordion just sounded like a polka and my friends thought it was funny. So that was a joke that I continue up to this very day.

Some people want to advertise their weirdness, and spread it out, that's not me.

Left all my Beatle records out in the sun, got a coke bottle stuck on the end of my tongue.

Pop culture's gotten much more disposable.

I'm obviously not a rapper, and I don't have any claims to be one, really.

It's hard to say, I picked one of my favorite articles for the MAD vault. Which is one of the features of the Magazine so they don't have to actually pay artists or writers to come up with new stuff.

I have very mixed feelings about it. On one hand, I'm concerned that the rampant downloading of my copyright-protected material over the Internet is severely eating into my album sales and having a decidedly adverse effect on my career. On the other hand, I can get all the Metallica songs I want for FREE! WOW!

I can bend paper clips into the shapes of small animals.

As much as people are griping about the Internet taking sales away from artists, it's been a huge promotional tool for me.

Why of course it's unlikely!' I said. 'Oh, by far!
The awesome-est things in the world often are!

When I started out, I didn't feel like I was really accepted in the music or comedy communities, and I was somewhere on the edge, but now I feel like I'm accepted in both, which is extremely gratifying.