All about Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business

by Mel Brooks

“We are here today to honor the very best of their fields, creators who give every piece of themselves to their craft. As Mel Brooks once said to his writers on Blazing Saddles, which is a great film: ‘Write anything you want, because we’ll never be heard from again. We will all be arrested for this movie.’ Now, to be fair, Mel also said, a little more eloquently, that, ‘Every human being has hundreds of separate people living inside his skin. And the talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living within him.’ And that, I think, is what the arts and the humanities do—they lift up our identities, and make us see ourselves in each other. And today’s honorees each possess a gift for this kind of creative empathy—a gift that allows us to exchange a sense of what’s most important and most profound in us, and to identify with our collective experience as Americans.”