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.

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.

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

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.

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

Still trying to run a hotel and getting it wrong,

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.

Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.

Muslims, who have a completely different value system, come to the West, then they should accept that there are certain basic values in the West intrinsic to our culture. Just as I wouldn't suggest that any Westerner walk down the streets of Saudi Arabia in a bikini.

Naturally, people's image is of a performer, but the reality of it is the writing for me has always been the most important thing and the most rewarding thing.

The one thing I remember about Christmas was that my father used to take me out in a boat about ten miles offshore on Christmas Day, and I used to have to swim back. Extraordinary. It was a ritual. Mind you, that wasn't the hard part. The difficult bit was getting out of the sack.

This is the extraordinary thing about creativity: If just you keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way, sooner or later you will get a reward from your unconscious.

I don't want to hurt people.

I'm not sure what's going on in Britain. I don't know what's going on in London. Because London is no longer an English city, and that's how they got the Olympics. I mean, they said, "We're the most cosmopolitan city on Earth," but it doesn't feel English.

We don't know where we get our ideas from. What we do know is that we do not get them from our laptops.

He who laughs most, learns best.

Bureaucrats shouldn't be in charge of comedy.

My views are heretical to people who believe in political correctness.

I find the Alexander Technique very helpful in my work. Things happen without you trying. They get to be light and relaxed. You must get an Alexander teacher to show it to you.

I'm very odd 'cause I think there's more than just a materialist planet, a materialist, reductionist planet.

To be creative you must create a space for yourself where you can be undisturbed... separate from everyday concerns.

Creativity is not the possession of some special talent. It’s about the willingness to play.

When we hold a World Championship for a particular sport, we invite teams from other countries to play as well.

Tension is wonderful for making people laugh.

All humour is critical, you know? You make stupid jokes. I mean, stupidity is an infirmity, isn't it?

Political correctness is a bit like a granny, a maiden aunt arriving at a party when everyone's having a good time. And she comes in, they all start sort of buttoning up and becoming self-conscious and behaving properly and then when she leaves, you can have fun again.

We all operate in two contrasting modes, which might be called open and closed. The open mode is more relaxed, more receptive, more exploratory, more democratic, more playful and more humorous. The closed mode is the tighter, more rigid, more hierarchical, more tunnel-visioned. Most people, unfortunately spend most of their time in the closed mode.

Because, as we all know, it’s easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking. And it’s also easier to do little things we know we can do than to start on big things that we’re not so sure about.

A lot of humour is about just enjoying life and spontaneity and because you make a joke that puts somebody down - we're always teasing each other. It's with affection. It's nasty teasing that we - not all teasing; nasty teasing you cut out.

It’s only on the brink that people find the will to change. Only at the precipice do we evolve.

The very essence of playfulness is an openness to anything that may happen, the feeling that whatever happens, it's okay... you're either free to play, or you're not.

Oh, I could spend my life having this conversation - look - please try to understand before one of us dies

The great thing about Florida is you - each city's about two hours' drive from everywhere else.

When you've only got few days of rehearsal before you're in the studio, it's wonderful to start off with people that you have good, friendly, tolerable relationships to start with, for the simple reason that you don't have to spend 24 hours figuring out how sensitive they are, and can you give them a line reading, or how do you have to give them direction.

The World is insane. With tiny spots of sanity, here and there... Not the other way around!

It's too difficult to start right from scratch and try and be funny out of the blue.

By watching the great, old comedians I picked up a few tricks about how to do physical comedy. And whenever I could learn something, I sort of added that to my repertoire.

I think it takes a long time, as you get older, to realize just how crazy the world is, just how ridiculous it all is.

I don't understand why very, very rich people want to have even more money than they've already got.

I've always called myself a writer/performer, not an actor because I basically write what I perform.

The writing is the most important bit, and performing it is just closing the circle because I'm less likely to screw it up than anyone else.

When I was in school, I was beaten every 30 minutes. It never did me any harm except for some psychological mal-adjustments and blurred vision.

Basil Fawlty was an easy character for me. For some reason, portraying a mean uptight incompetent bully comes naturally to me.

If you are leaping a ravine, the moment of takeoff is a bad time for considering alternative strategies... Do it in the 'closed' mode. But the moment the action is over, try to return to the 'open' mode... because in that mode we are the most aware, most receptive, most creative, and therefore at our most intelligent.

When you do comedy in front of an audience, they are the ones who tell you whether it's funny or not and which bits are funny and which bits need to be fixed.

What have the Romans ever done for us?

Ask yourself, "When does this decision have to be taken?" and having answered it, defer the decision until then, in order to give yourself maximum pondering time.