Eric Idle Quotations

I have been very blessed in my life and rewarded with good friends and good health. I am grateful and happy to be able to share this.

A website can be very time-intensive, but I'd love to have one where people can contribute to it - like invent islands and make their own flags, and their own laws. I think that'd be kind of fun.

I love my family, my wife, my kids, my dogs, my home, my life. I am a very happy and contented man.

At least in America, you have freedom of speech, which is a good thing. It's just a question of whether you're allowed to use it on 'Fox News'.

Talent is always more interesting - ambition is not interesting. If you have talent, you have to find ways of expressing it, but you may not be a success in the world's terms.

I like being a foreigner. For me, to live in California is very pleasant - I'm more comfortable not feeling a part of everything, not feeling responsible for the government or the roads or the health system.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will make me go in a corner and cry by myself for hours.

Life took over 4 billion years to evolve into you, and you've about 70 more years to enjoy it. Don't just pursue happiness, catch it.

I listen to the audience and try and bounce with them. All audiences are different. But they are all homo sapiens.

My education was paid for by the RAF Benevolent Fund, so a charity school, run like an orphanage, with uniforms and beatings. It was tough, but it got me to Cambridge - like being a chrysalis suddenly becoming a butterfly.

The dreadful thing about getting older is you cry at the drop of a hat.

John Cleese once told me he'd do anything for money. So I offered him a pound to shut up, and he took it.

It just seems to me that there's no particular reason comedy albums should be dead. There's a lot to laugh at. We have very funny people, still.

You initially become funny as a kid because you're looking for attention and love. Psychologists think that's all to do with mother abandonment. I think John Cleese has his depressions, and Terry Gilliam's the same. All of us together make one completely insane person.

I do pool exercises, like weightlifting but underwater. I walk, I swim... I'm pretty fit for an old bloke.

Life is a comedy when watching and a tragedy when experiencing. I try and share anything I have.

Probably spending 12 years at boarding school - comedy became a survival gene. But I think some people are funny right off the bat, as soon as they can speak or be naughty.

I love being an older comic now. It's like being an old soccer or an old baseball player. You're in the Hall of Fame and it's nice, but you're no longer that person in the limelight on the spot doing that thing.

Nobody gets irony anymore, as we are now living in the post-ironic age. Once George Bush gets a library, our irony is dead.

No day of my life passes without someone saying the words 'Monty Python' to me. It's not bad.

It's such fun to take a lot of people and create something silly.

People can tell the truth much more freely when they're apparently lying.

I think the special thing about Python is that it's a writers' commune. The writers are in charge. The writers decide what the material is.

If the studios paid the artists, how would they ever be able to afford the executives?

I never think in terms of target audience. I try to write what makes me laugh, so I'm the target audience. I guess I just hope there's another person in America like me.

Americans like to think 'Python' is how English people really are. There is an element of truth to that.

I like the idea of being out there regularly with an audience and with a funny gang of people. That's what I grew up with - doing television, doing shows every week.

I was thrilled to win a Tony in 2005 for 'Spamalot'.

I will jump on anybody's private plane at the drop of a hat. I'm an old-fashioned lower-middle-class boy.

I'm drawn to things that aren't particularly popular at the time. I don't know why.

I'm more surprised than anyone that 'Spamalot's done so well. You can never predict what's going to be a hit.

I've always found bad films more enjoyable than good ones.

The Minister of Transport issued this appeal to motorists: Can anyone give him a lift to Leicester?

We've discovered that the less we do, the more money we make.

I love stage work. The thing about plays is that they're perfectible. With film, you shoot that take and maybe another. During 'Spamalot,' I rewrote Act II three times.

I won't read scripts because I have a limited amount of time. Why should I help other people do lame stuff when I can just go out and put on lame stuff of my own?

To me, the musical is best when it's a musical comedy. So if you have a very, very funny show, and very good, funny songs, that's what the musical does best.

Nudge nudge, know what I mean, say no more

But we were wrong and we were amazed.

Because we hate each other. I'm perfectly happy to get drunk with the rest of them. I was just in London, and we had a really spectacular dinner. But I think it should go no further. We've earned that.

This was our first chance to get a proper, grown-up TV show.

I think the nice thing for us has been that every 10 years there's been a complete change in technology. It's like buying your own records again.

I think he's the most intelligent man I've ever met. Honesty, simplicity and truth are the secret to his comedy.

We're all over 60. I'm sorry to say this, but comedy is really a young man's game. It's sort of about what you had to say when you were fresh and young. And I'm perfectly happy to get drunk with the rest of them.

We're like his test audience. It's a nightmare for Steve, a terrifying experience. The fact that he's done it before doesn't stop the angst.

To me, the musical is best when it's a musical comedy, ... So if you have a very, very funny show, and very good, funny songs, that's what the musical does best.

As long as there are innocent nickels to be made from the gullible, Python-starved public, I shall be out there dressed in silly frocks and singing filthy lyrics. I'm coming your way in search of ancient dollars.

There was often antagonism and chair throwing and stamping of feet, which is kind of a healthy thing to do when you're arguing about what's funny. That healthy tension was something that held the group together.

At least one way of measuring the freedom of any society is the amount of comedy that is permitted, and clearly a healthy society permits more satirical comment than a repressive, so that if comedy is to function in some way as a safety release then it must obviously deal with these taboo areas. This is part of the responsibility we accord our licensed jesters, that nothing be excused the searching light of comedy. If anything can survive the probe of humour it is clearly of value, and conversely all groups who claim immunity from laughter are claiming special privileges which should not be granted.

It was extraordinary. I mean, for us it was just an amazement that people were watching it in Dallas of all places and were loving it.

It took all of 15 minutes, but then I have my David Attenborough voice down and there wasn't a lot to do. Most of the time was spent waiting for the guys in Los Angeles to come on line. When they did we breezed through it in four quick takes in a pleasant recording studio, Audio for the Arts on South Blair Street, where they do The Onion. Madison was the original home of The Onion, before it moved to New York, and they still do the radio bits from here.

They have to get their own personal best. It's called my personal best. ... There was one or two things everybody wanted, and we sort of agreed to let some people have them.

George once said to me "If we'd known we were going to be The Beatles we'd have tried harder.

I used to have a house in London, but couldn't face 20 more years of St John's Wood in the rain.

My wife, Tania, is very big on dogs, so I'm always paying out to animal charities.

I never pay any attention to figures.

I used to collect Persian rugs and real estate - you should be able to walk on and live in your money. I had to give up the rugs because I'm allergic to mould.

I'm not careful with my money at all these days. I buy people a lot of dinners!

I don't invest in the stock market, but I have pension funds - some in America and the UK.

When, in 1966, I progressed to The Frost Report, I was paid ten guineas a minute. I was guaranteed three minutes a week, so this was good money.

People who are interested in money are really uninteresting people. They look like Donald Trump.

Monty Python paid me £20,000 to write, direct and assemble them - the cheapskates! I told them I'd never earned less in a year since leaving Cambridge. The first show sold out in 43 seconds and we ended up performing ten in total. We had no idea there would be such demand.

I live in a Spanish-style hillside home in Los Angeles, California. I paid $900,000 in 1995. It's perhaps worth about $3m now. Thankfully, I paid off my mortgage before the crash because I could see it coming. I worried that I would be caught having to pay off a very high mortgage for a house I couldn't sell.

My first professional job was appearing in a disastrous theatre production of Oh, What a Lovely War in Leicester Rep, shortly after leaving Cambridge.

When I was 23 I started writing for I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again and was paid three guineas for every minute's airtime.

You could write a joke in the pub at lunchtime and watch it performed on television that evening.

Having little money to spend was a valuable learning experience. My schooling also shaped my work ethic because while other children were listening to the Goons, I was studying, which enabled me to go to Cambridge University.

My father, who was a sergeant in the RAF during the Second World War, was killed in a hitchhiking accident while returning home on compassionate leave. As a result, my mother had to get work, as a nurse, and at seven the RAF put me into a boarding school and ex-orphanage called the Royal Wolverhampton School.

So it became in my mind a nine-carol service; an oratorio and orchestral concert all in one, but with narration. That's something I've learned about, because it's the story that keeps you in there. I wrote a libretto and I gave it to John [Du Prez, Idle's co-writer of many years]. We normally don't work in this fashion but I said off you go, and he went off for about three months. He brought me back this demo which blew my mind.

Many years ago I also bought a house in Provence for about 70,000 francs. It had no electricity or running water, and no road leading to the house, but gradually we made improvements. It's my escape and I love it.

Writers tend to suffer from back problems because they spend their time bent over a desk.

We learnt a lot because we got in with real choreographers who tell you what they need from a song, because a song has to advance the story. Then real directors like Mike Nichols tell you where you can have 'B themes' and 'C themes', and we go oh yes, B themes and C themes! So we were taught in the finest school amongst the finest people. And also by the school of experience.

We never have that thought! The whole object is to bite off more than you can chew. John [Du Prez] always says, Eric thinks of something completely insane and insists we go in that direction. It's the correct way to look at things and the correct place to start, I think.

Well we were lucky because we started in Canada where everybody has a sense of humour! We flirted a little while with Josh Groban. He was personally interested in it. He said oh I'd love to do something different, and I said well it's pretty different! But in the end the dates didn't work out.

If you're famous, you have to [be overly generous], otherwise people say, "Eric Idle came in and only left me $4." I always tip more than people expect.

I pay taxes in three countries, but can't vote in any of them.

You could feel the place going crazy because we hadn't been on stage together for maybe 35 years and the audience could just feel us in the darkness come on and they went nuts. It made the little hairs stand up on the back of my neck and we sang Sit on My Face, which I thought was wonderfully appropriate for George's memorial, and then we bowed and we showed our bare asses.

I always have a feeling you should move the playing field and the minute you know what you're doing, you're wrong. Therefore, I wanted us not to try to follow Spamalot immediately, but to do something different. This is perfect because it uses all the same skills, like story telling and lyric writing and music writing, but it's presenting it in a different form. And of course it gives me and John a nice chance to perform and show off which is also fun.

I think you often learn from failure. Success just teaches you how great you were, but in fact it's knowing what will fail that will help you to make the right choices.

I just believe in a huge universe of billions of miles.

There's no gap between the writer and the performer, which is what I think makes [Monty] Python unique. Five or six people who write Python and five or six who act it. That's what makes it unique.

When we graduated [ from Cambridge], we were grabbed right into television. I was grabbed straight into the practice of writing comedy. It was all writing and performing. You wrote something in order for you to perform it.

I got locked into a tradition [at Cambridge] of doing comedy.

Even if you've written something for print, I think it's good to try [it] out on someone because it changes. You can think it's hilarious and they can tell you it's not.

One of the reasons we moved to L.A. in the first place [was] so that it was no big deal that I was in show business. We decided if we move[d] to L.A., then everyone in one way or another was involved in it.

Filming a pirate film is always good fun, with ships and indecent clothing.

At Cambridge, you have to kiss the vice-chancellor's fingers. But I missed out on that, 'cause I was doing a matinee. I don't want to kiss a strange man's fingers anyway.

I try to not to be a celebrity as much as possible.

I'm not really a celebrity; I'm just vestigially left over from doing stuff from before.

I get to be the first doctor in the family [because of the honorary degree they're giving me].

Executives do not on the whole do well with comedy. They can't understand it, they can't read it, they can't spot it.

I don't necessarily know much about comedy, I don't spend a lot of time watching it. Mainly because all my life for about 50 years I've had comedy.

I interviewed Matt [Stone] and Trey [Parker], actually, and I got to ask them questions. I love them deeply because they appeared dressed as J-Lo and someone else [who had worn the same scandalous dresses the year before at the Oscars]. They confessed they were on acid.

I don't like animation. I hate animation, actually.

Everybody has their own free choice to do what they want...

Life doesn't make any sense, and we all pretend it does. Comedy's job is to point out that it doesn't make sense, and that it doesn't make much difference anyway.

The idea that we evolved with these thoughts is actually very fascinating - to me.

What's brown and sounds like a bell? DUNG!

I got used to dealing with groups of boys and getting on with life in unpleasant circumstances and being smart and funny and subversive at the expense of authority.

Of the sparkling wines, the most famous is Perth Pink. This is a bottle with a message in, and the message is "beware". This is not a wine for drinking; this is a wine for laying down and avoiding.