John Cleese Quotations

The thrill I got discovering Buster Keaton when I was growing up was so exciting. He was one of the greats.

The Americans all love 'The Holy Grail', and the English all love 'Life Of Brian', and I'm afraid on this one, I side with the English.

I think it's because in America you always get the sense that if you fail, you can just pack up your things and go somewhere else and try again. But in England, it's so geographically small that if somebody succeeds here, it reduces your chances of succeeding.

My compulsion to always be working has become less strong and my current business is purely down to this enormous alimony. If I wasn't doing this I'd be making documentaries about wildlife and other subjects that interest me.

Sci-fi has never really been my bag. But I do believe in a lot of weird things these days, such as synchronicity. Quantum physics suggests it's possible, so why not?

When the target audience is American teenage kids, you can have problems. My generation prized really fine acting and writing. Sometimes you have to go back to the basic principles which underpin great visual comedy.

A wonderful thing about true laughter is that it just destroys any kind of system of dividing people.

The most creative people have this childlike facility to play.

Now most people do not want an ordinary life in which they do a job well, earn the respect of their collaborators and competitors, bring up a family and have friends. That's not enough any more, and I think that is absolutely tragic - and I'm not exaggerating - that people feel like a decent, ordinary, fun life is no longer enough.

But then acting is all about faking. We're all very good at faking things that we have no competence with.

For me, the great problem growing up in England was that I had a very narrow concept of what God can be, and it was damn close to an old man with a beard.

I love having different cultures around, but when the parent culture kind of dissipates, you're left thinking, 'Well, what's going on?'

I can never do better than Fawlty Towers whatever I do. Now I very much want to teach young talent some rules of the game.

Filming takes a lot out of you. It really does. It's immensely demanding, and you have to put the rest of your life in the icebox until you do your final shot.

The really good idea is always traceable back quite a long way, often to a not very good idea which sparked off another idea that was only slightly better, which somebody else misunderstood in such a way that they then said something which was really rather interesting.

If life were fair, Dan Quayle would be making a living asking 'Do you want fries with that?'

If I can get you to laugh with me, you like me better, which makes you more open to my ideas. And if I can persuade you to laugh at the particular point I make, by laughing at it you acknowledge its truth.

I was very sad to hear of the death of Ronnie Barker, who was such a warm, friendly and encouraging presence to have when I started in television. He was also a great comic actor to learn from.

I think you can write very good comedy without a partner, but what I love about it, working with a partner, is that you get to places you'd never get on your own. It's like when God was designing the world and decided we couldn't have children without a partner; it was a way of mixing up the genes so you'd get a more interesting product.

I can't tell you how scary it can be walking onto a movie and suddenly joining this family, it's like going to somebody else's Christmas dinner, everyone knows everyone, and you're there and you're not quite sure what you're supposed to be doing.

If God did not intend for us to eat animals, then why did he make them out of meat?

I have several times made a poor choice by avoiding a necessary confrontation.

You don't have to be the Dalai Lama to tell people that life's about change.

The English contribution to world cuisine - the chip.

If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.

A man will give up almost anything except his suffering.

I find it rather easy to portray a businessman. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me.

Don't let anyone tell you what you ought to like... Some wines that some experts think are absolutely exquisite don't appeal to me at all.

I think that money spoils most things, once it becomes the primary motivating force.

Wine is wonderful stuff. But so many people are put off by the snobbery of it.

Most of the bad taste I've been accused of has been generic bad taste; it's been making fun of an idea as opposed to a person.

God was treated like this powerful, erratic, rather punitive father who has to be pacified and praised. You know, flattered.

England is a fairly envious little country and it's embodied in the press. They don't like anyone being more distinguished than they are.

I'm not saying Obama is right on everything. Of course not. He may be wrong on a number of things. But what I do know is that he behaves like a very, very sane man almost all the time.

English television from the Fifties to the Nineties was the least bad in the world, and now it's just as bad as it is anywhere.

I just think that sometimes we hang onto people or relationships long after they've ceased to be of any use to either of you. I'm always meeting new people, and my list of friends seems to change quite a bit.

I want to write a book which is the history of comedy.

I'm always meeting new people, and my list of friends seems to change quite a bit.

Some actors, I think, want to feel that they are as creative as the writer. And the answer is, frankly, they're not.

It seems astounding to me now that the video games are perhaps as important as the movie themselves. And people will spend 2 or 3 years obsessing about the video game in exactly the same way that they'd be obsessing about the movie if they were working on that.

I would say that I began with a very edgy, very driven personality and after a sufficient amount of therapy over many, many years, I managed to become rather relaxed and happy.

I used to desire many, many things, but now I have just one desire, and that's to get rid of all my other desires.

Comedy always works best when it is mean-spirited.

Michael Palin decided to give up on his considerable comedy talents to make those dreadfully tedious travel shows. Have you ever tried to watch one?

Well, the only way I can get a leading-man role is if I write it.

In Britain, girls seem to be either bright or attractive. In America, that's not the case. They're both.

Who's ever going to write a film in which I get the girl? Me!

I was always a sports nut but I've lost interest now in whether one bunch of mercenaries in north London is going to beat another bunch of mercenaries from west London.

I tend to have an odd split in my mind: I tend to look at it as a writer and when the writing thing is OK and I'm happy with it, then I put on my actor's hat.

I think that sometimes you do something that makes a small group of people laugh, which is all we were trying to do; we were just trying to make each other laugh.

When you've been doing comedy for forty years, you really do know most of the jokes. And even if you don't know a specific joke, you can pretty much guess what it's going to be.

I don't miss London much. I find it crowded, vast and difficult to get around. Cabs are incredibly expensive.

When you get to the age of 64 and you can't do one or two of the things that Bond does, it will be a nice little fantasy for me.

We stay in contact vaguely because there are often little things to discuss, but I don't think we've been in a room together for four years.

At the start, Connie wrote the Polly and Sybil roles, and she and I wrote Basil together,

Don't let anyone tell you what you ought to like, ... Some wines that some experts think are absolutely exquisite don't appeal to me at all.

There's so many good people producing wine now, ... It's just amazing. There's so much on the shelves. You don't have to go buy those overpriced wines.

It's exactly the same territory, and it's a complete coincidence.

It's a catchy tune. Hopefully you'll be hearing it on a football terrace near you, very, very soon.

Still trying to run a hotel and getting it wrong,

I had not seen it for a long time and was suddenly embarrassed to find that I was laughing more than anyone.

I had a very, very difficult relationship with my mother, who was supremely self-centred. She was hilariously self-centred. She did not really take interest in anything that didn't immediately affect her.

On movies, I like to involve the cast in the writing of the script. I like to have a rehearsal period, after which I do the last draft, which gives me a chance to incorporate anything the actors have come up with during the rehearsal period, so I'm very inclusive as a writer.

You can't make Christ funny. He's self-aware, he's too flexible within the situation. It's rigidity, it's when the ego takes over and the behavior becomes inappropriate that it becomes funny.

I have a tendency sometimes to get too logical with what I'm writing, just because I want it to be kind of perfect.

The Americans are just more enthusiastic and more likely to engage in hyperbole.

British press think entirely in clichés, and when they do come across creative work, they think that it must be based on something, because they don't realize that you can create things that aren't based on things.

What I've always wanted to do is be as funny as possible.

No hope for planet at all. But I will be gone before the planet is gone, so it's your problem.

Nerves are always a big problem for me, which is why I loved doing American sitcoms. Because you know when you do the take in front of the audience that you're going to do it again afterwards. A minute after you finish, you just go and do it again. So, there's that sort of safety net. And then if you made a little mistake or two, they'll go pick it up, so there's nothing to worry about.

Manuel will show you to your rooms - if you're lucky.

Laughter is a force for democracy.

I think the hard thing for young comedians is that the majority of the young people in the audience out there don't have the wide range of references.

Don't let anyone tell you what you ought to like...

Creativity is not an ability that you either have or do not have. It is, for example, and this may surprise you, absolutely unrelated to IQ, provided you're intelligent above a certain minimal level.

While you're being creative, nothing is wrong. There's no such thing as a mistake, and any drivel may lead to the breakthrough.

Give your mind as long as possible to come up with something original.

The real religion is about the understanding that if we can only still our egos for a few seconds, we might have a chance of experiencing something that is divine in nature. But in order to do that, we have to slice away at our egos and try to get them down to a manageable size, and then still work some practiced light meditation. So real religion is about reducing our egos, whereas all the churches are interested in is egotistical activities, like getting as many members and raising as much money and becoming as important and high-profile and influential as possible.

There's something about watching an animal that puts you in contact with where we came from and what we're still a part of.

I think that the real religion is about the understanding that if we can only still our egos for a few seconds, we might have a chance of experiencing something that is divine in nature.

I think there are so many activities going on, like mountaineering. You know, you would pay good money not to have to do that, and yet there are people racing out who want to spend their spare time clambering up rocks.

Telling people how to be creative is easy - being creative is difficult.

When you get to my age, and I'm 66 now, you realize that the world is a madhouse and that most people are operating in fantasy anyway. So once you realise that, it doesn't bother you much.

Would you take a billion dollars, if as part of the deal the Earth were made uninhabitable a year after your death? ... well, of course not; you care about your friends, above all your children, any grandchildren. But ... what if the deal calls for the planet to be poisoned a thousand years later? We feel strong obligations to generations in the near future - should we not feel the same way about our children's great-grandchildren and generations beyond them?

I think that I feel an indignation when I don't understand something.

It's a plastic surgeon you need, not a doctor

Filming is like a long air journey: there's so much hanging around and boredom that they keep giving you food.

Too many people confuse being serious with being solemn.

Other people, you know, put a latex rubber on, you know, to become sexually excited. There's so much I don't understand.

I think the problem with people like this is that they are so stupid that they have no idea how stupid they are.

Nothing will stop you being creative more effectively as the fear of making a mistake.

I can do anything I want, I'm eccentric!

The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.

Your Mother was A Hamster and you Father Smelled of elder berries

If you really don't know where to start or if you're stuck, start generating random connections and allow your intuition to tell you if one might lead somewhere interesting.

The sad thing about true stupidity is that you can do absolutely nothing about it.

You go in and meet the head of BBC One and get an assurance about not dumbing down. And then, of course a few months later, he's been replaced by someone you haven't met.

I learned a lot of things about literature talking to people at the publishing company. Did you know that about 90 percent of celebrity autobiographies are ghostwritten?

There are 3 basic differences between we British and you Americans. One, we speak English, and you don't. Two, when we have a "World Championship", we invite teams from other nations. Three, when you meet the British head of State, you only have to get down on one knee.

There's nothing good on the television; let's burn a witch. It must have been terribly exciting to live in those times.