Top 100 John Cleese Quotes
#1. Terry Gilliam has spoken scathingly about my preference for physical comfort. I have come to the conclusion that this is very much his problem.
John Cleese
#2. What I've always wanted to do is be as funny as possible.
John Cleese
#3. And now for something completely different . . .
John Cleese
#4. 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.
John Cleese
#5. If you wish to kill yourself but lack the courage to, I think a visit to Palmerston North will do the trick,
John Cleese
#6. Manuel will show you to your rooms - if you're lucky.
John Cleese
#7. It's easier to be creative if you've got other people to play with.
John Cleese
#8. Tension is wonderful for making people laugh.
John Cleese
#9. I've always found life quite difficult to explain to people or to myself.
John Cleese
#10. I can do anything I want, I'm eccentric!
John Cleese
#11. It was an astonishing fantasy but it showed me what even apparently sensible people can believe if they really want to. I
John Cleese
#12. We don't know where we get our ideas from. What we do know is that we do not get them from our laptops.
John Cleese
#13. 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.
John Cleese
#14. The thrill I got discovering Buster Keaton when I was growing up was so exciting. He was one of the greats.
John Cleese
#15. I want to write a book which is the history of comedy.
John Cleese
#16. 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.
John Cleese
#18. What have the Romans ever done for us?
John Cleese
#19. Genuinely good manners are, after all, essentially a way of moderating one's own egotism, often in the service of considering the egos of others. Even if it's done mainly for show, it's still a start.
John Cleese
#20. Other people, you know, put a latex rubber on, you know, to become sexually excited. There's so much I don't understand.
John Cleese
#21. I'm struck by how laughter connects you with people. It's almost impossible to maintain any kind of distance or any sense of social hierarchy when you're just howling with laughter. Laughter is a force for democracy.
John Cleese
#22. The British fans are liable to suddenly be talking to you about something that you don't know how you got into the conversation. I think it's something to do with the fact that they've been watching you for so many years sort of you telling your story.
John Cleese
#23. So . . . suddenly there were no tapes of The 1948 Show. It was no more. It was an ex-series.
John Cleese
#24. 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.
John Cleese
#25. 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.
John Cleese
#26. Aping urbanity,
Oozing with vanity,
Plump as a manatee,
Faking humanity,
Intellectual inanity,
Journalistic calamity,
Fox Noise insanity,
You're a profanity,
Hannity
John Cleese
#27. A man will give up almost anything except his suffering.
John Cleese
#28. Cats are very intelligent at all the things that cats need to be intelligent about.
John Cleese
#29. Your Mother was A Hamster
and you Father Smelled of elder berries
John Cleese
#30. 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.
John Cleese
#31. 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.
John Cleese
#32. 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.
John Cleese
#33. I have a tendency sometimes to get too logical with what I'm writing, just because I want it to be kind of perfect.
John Cleese
#34. Once we've made a decision, we are efficient only if we go through with it decisively, undistracted by doubts about its correctness.
John Cleese
#35. 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?
John Cleese
#36. (I'd arrived after the matinee and still remember an autograph hunter at the stagedoor asking me, 'Are you anybody?' I was tempted to answer him ontologically, but instead told him a white lie, and denied my own existence.)
John Cleese
#37. I think the problem with people like this is that they are so stupid that they have no idea how stupid they are.
John Cleese
#38. If you are leaping a ravine, the moment of takeoff is a bad time to be considering alternative strategies.
John Cleese
#39. Oh, I could spend my life having this conversation - look - please try to understand before one of us dies
John Cleese
#40. I think that I feel an indignation when I don't understand something.
John Cleese
#41. 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.
John Cleese
#42. I don't want to have to start being unselfish again. The great thing about being on your own is you do what you damned well like.
John Cleese
#43. 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.
John Cleese
#44. Wine is wonderful stuff. But so many people are put off by the snobbery of it.
John Cleese
#45. 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.
John Cleese
#46. 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.
John Cleese
#47. Life is a terminal disease, and it is sexually transmitted.
John Cleese
#48. Students who laugh more- learn more. Students who laugh more earn more.
John Cleese
#49. The English contribution to world cuisine - the chip.
John Cleese
#50. 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.
John Cleese
#51. 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.
John Cleese
#52. 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.
John Cleese
#53. The French have so many civil wars, they can win one now and again.
John Cleese
#54. Some actors, I think, want to feel that they are as creative as the writer. And the answer is, frankly, they're not.
John Cleese
#55. That's a lovely experience when you make an audience laugh. Then the nerves go away for a bit. And sometimes you do things then that you've never done before that are really funny.
John Cleese
#56. 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.
John Cleese
#57. I realised that I really disliked him, and I knew exactly why: he didn't know the difference between being solemn and being serious.
John Cleese
#58. The Americans are just more enthusiastic and more likely to engage in hyperbole.
John Cleese
#59. 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.
John Cleese
#60. Filming is like a long air journey: there's so much hanging around and boredom that they keep giving you food.
John Cleese
#61. Graham always used to say that I was shocked when he came out. That implies some sort of moral objection. Untrue. I was not 'shocked', I was very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very surprised.
John Cleese
#62. Why write about the past? Well, there's more of it.
John Cleese
#63. Come to me. I want to plow you like a Calgary driveway at Christmas.
John Cleese
#64. Comedy always works best when it is mean-spirited.
John Cleese
#65. 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.
John Cleese
#66. Nothing will stop you being creative more effectively as the fear of making a
mistake.
John Cleese
#67. I get bored easily. I've been bored most of my life.
John Cleese
#68. Too many people confuse being serious with being solemn.
John Cleese
#69. Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.
John Cleese
#70. It's too difficult to start right from scratch and try and be funny out of the blue.
John Cleese
#71. Who's ever going to write a film in which I get the girl? Me!
John Cleese
#72. I think that money spoils most things, once it becomes the primary motivating force.
John Cleese
#73. I don't understand why very, very rich people want to have even more money than they've already got.
John Cleese
#74. 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.
John Cleese
#75. 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.
John Cleese
#76. A satisfied customer. We should have him stuffed.
John Cleese
#77. You have to create boundaries of space and then you have to create boundaries of time.
John Cleese
#79. 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.
John Cleese
#81. You do realize as you grow older that almost nobody knows what they are talking about.
John Cleese
#82. I think we're all born with a sense of humor. Creativity is another thing though.
John Cleese
#83. 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.
John Cleese
#84. No hope for planet at all. But I will be gone before the planet is gone, so it's your problem.
John Cleese
#85. If life were fair, Dan Quayle would be making a living asking 'Do you want fries with that?'
John Cleese
#86. 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.
John Cleese
#87. Sense of humor is so much more subjective than anyone believes.
John Cleese
#88. What is absurd is not the teachings of the founders of religion, it's what followers subsequently make of it.
John Cleese
#89. Either people walk round dressed as chickens or they listen to Beethoven.
John Cleese
#90. It seemed as though he had a fundamental belief that the merit of his argument depended on the strength of his feelings about the matter, and since he always felt uncontrollably passionate about everything, then clearly he was always right.
John Cleese
#91. You don't have to be the Dalai Lama to tell people that life's about change.
John Cleese
#92. Only a few things in life matter a little. The rest don't matter at all.
John Cleese
#93. I find it rather easy to portray a businessman. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me.
John Cleese
#94. 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.
John Cleese
#95. 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.
John Cleese
#96. John Cleese ... he cannot sing and keeps a locked piano in his room to prove it.
John Cleese
#97. 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.
John Cleese
#98. The most creative people have learned to tolerate the slight discomfort of indecision for much longer and so, just because they put in more pondering time, their solutions are more creative.
John Cleese
#99. We need to be in the open mode when we are pondering a problem, but, once we come up with a solution, we must then switch to the closed mode to implement it.
John Cleese
#100. 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.
John Cleese
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