John Cleese quotes:

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 certainly see that you know your wine. Most of the guests who stay here wouldn't know the difference between Bordeaux and Claret.

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 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.

The most creative people have this childlike facility to play.

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.

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.

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?

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

Come to me. I want to plow you like a Calgary driveway at Christmas.

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'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.

A man will give up almost anything except his suffering.

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

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

I think humor is incredibly positive, I think it is life advancing. There's medical research to show that it improves your antibodies. It's all about sense and perspective.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

The English contribution to world cuisine - the chip.

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

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

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

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.

My hovercraft is full of eels.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tension is wonderful for making people laugh.

Comedy always works best when it is mean-spirited.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

When people say 'I'm not a prude, but ...' what they mean is 'I am a prude, and ...'.

When you're being stalked by an angry mob with raspberries, the first thing to do is to release a tiger.

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

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him enter regional distribution codes in data field 97 to facilitate regression analysis on the back end.

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.

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.

Why write about the past? Well, there's more of it.

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

A satisfied customer. We should have him stuffed.

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.

If you are leaping a ravine, the moment of takeoff is a bad time to be considering alternative strategies.

The trouble with the British is that they are not interested in ideas. If Jesus came back today and offered to speak for an hour on British television, they would say, "What! Another talking head?

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.

If I like chocolate it won't surprise you that I have a few chocolates in my fridge, but if you find out I've got 16 warehouses full of chocolate, you'd think I was insane. All these rich guys are insane, obsessive compulsive twits obsessed with money - money is all they think about - they're all nuts.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Everything in comedy's got to be exactly right, which is why making a comedic film is kind of a difficult process, because, for most of the two years of shooting it and editing it and reshooting and all of that, it's not quite right. And it's only when you just at the end, you put the final polish on it, it becomes really funny again.

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.

I don't want to hurt people.

We all die at the end, but does that nullify everything? Would most people rather say, "I wish I hadn't been born?" Once you're born you'll have to die, now is that funny or sad?

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

...when you collaborate with someone else on something creative, you get to places that you would never get to on your own. The way an idea builds as it careens back and forth between good writers is so unpredictable. Sometimes it depends on people misunderstanding each other, and that's why I don't think there's any such thing as a mistake in the creative process. You never know where it might lead.

Aping urbanity, Oozing with vanity, Plump as a manatee, Faking humanity, Intellectual inanity, Journalistic calamity, Fox Noise insanity, You're a profanity, Hannity

I think we're all born with a sense of humor. Creativity is another thing though.

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.

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.

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

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

Bureaucrats shouldn't be in charge of comedy.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

He who laughs most, learns best.

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.

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?

Sense of humor is so much more subjective than anyone believes.

Life is a terminal disease, and it is sexually transmitted.

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

I've always found life quite difficult to explain to people or to myself.

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.

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

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

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.

If you want to know who your friends are, have a major failure.

The Americans are so much more positive. They are much more in love with success. In Britain, they're a fairly envious bunch, and they love it if you fail.

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

When people quote sketches to me, half the time I don't know what they're talking about so I have to sort of go, aha, yes, oh yep, I remember that and lie my way out of it.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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