[on Zombieland (2009)] They weren't zombies. It was like some weird mad cow disease.

Shaun of the Dead (2004) is an amazing zombie movie but it's also an amazing cultural essay of who Britain was at that point. I think it's sort of the Clerks (1994) of Britain. Real emotions, real drama... I mean, what a movie.

[re mother Anne Bancroft] Life is not fair, I'll tell you that. It was hard for her to be a mom, to give up all that and to try and raise me, because she didn't have much of a mom. But she did it. She did an amazing job.

[re dyslexia in grade school] I remember I used to come up to my teacher crying because I couldn't read. She would say: 'You can do this. You just don't want to do this.'

I'm not a horror fan. I'm an anti-horror fan. I think horror fans feel deep down in the pit of their souls, they feel safe, and therefore bored. And therefore they want to be scared. I already have a baseline level of just anxiety about the world I live in," he continued, metaphorically pushing the horror genre away from him on the table. "I don't need to go seeking it out.

Since 2001, people have been scared. There's been some really scary stuff that's been happening - 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, anthrax letters, D.C. sniper, global warming, global financial meltdown, bird flu, swine flu, SARS. I think people really feel like the system's breaking down. It's Hurricane Katrina. It's neighbors knifing each other for food, women being raped, the cops not showing up, children dying of starvation, an old lady dying in a wheelchair. If all that happens because of a zombie plague, then you can say, 'Oh, well, that would never happen, because there's no zombies'.

You want to talk about ruining a movie? Because the scene where the military commander in 28 Days Later... (2002) says, 'I'm waiting to see how long it takes for the infected to starve to death.' I thought, 'Well, if they eat... then they drink right? They need water?' Well, after four days the human body starts to shut down, so in a purely realistic movie, the dude would wake up out of the hospital and London would just be littered with dehydrated corpses and the movie would be called Four Days Later.

I'm a really crappy liar. That's one of the reasons my wife married me because she knows I can never have an affair.

If you were a vampire you're at the top of the food chain, and you've been spoiled. You're essentially the aristocracy. You have all these gifts: speed, strength, immortality and anonymity.

My rule is that whatever I write has to start with its first fan, which is me, I have to love it, because if I don't love it then it's not worth doing.

[re father Mel Brooks] I've no desire to become the next king of Jewish immigrant comics, but I am so proud of my old man.