Top 100 Cleese Quotes
#1. Something about John Cleese was always very unsettled, I felt. There was always something else he wanted to do. He seemed constantly driven by this sense that there was a nirvana somewhere; some unique place where mind, body and soul would be utterly satisfied.
Michael Palin
#2. High creativity is responding to situations without critical thought.' - John Cleese
Paul Arden
#4. John Cleese was with a group called Cambridge Circus, who had come to New York, and we became friends. Years later that produced a certain team effort.
Terry Gilliam
#5. I wanted to be a writer-performer like the Pythons. In fact, I wanted to be John Cleese, and it took me some time to realise that the job was, in fact, taken.
Douglas Adams
#6. 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.
Eric Idle
#7. [On John Cleese:] He sometimes seems to swat at his own thoughts as if they were bees.
Penelope Gilliatt
#8. Americans think the only funny Brits are John Cleese, Benny Hill and whoever makes our toothpaste. They're not laughing with us, they are laughing at us.
A.A. Gill
#9. Wisdom: Oh, fantastic. We've got an army made up of fairies and Beatles, and we're fighting H. G. Wells' martians and bloody Jack the Rippers. Who's next? Dick Van Dyke? Mr Bean? John Cleese and his dead parrot?
Paul Cornell
#10. I got my first television at Stanford when I was 20, and I used to watch 'The Dick Van Dyke Show'. He played my father on 'Becker,' and he's still one of my heroes. Along with John Cleese, he's my favourite physical comedian.
Ted Danson
#11. I fought side by side with the gods and some other demigod ... Harry Cleese, I think." "Heracles?" Piper suggested politely. "Whatever," Bacchus said. "Anyway, I
Rick Riordan
#12. John Cleese was a big hero of mine. He grew up in Weston Super Mare near Bristol where I grew up; he was always very tall and gangly, but he was smart and used his physicality in a very funny way. I used to think, 'Well he came from Weston and he did it, so there's a chance for me.'
Stephen Merchant
#13. John Cleese once told me he'd do anything for money. So I offered him a pound to shut up, and he took it.
Eric Idle
#14. To me, if you are in the same building with Peter Sellers or John Cleese, or any of those guys and holding your own making other people laugh, that's a compliment.
Alice Cooper
#15. I wanted to be John Cleese. It took me some time to realise that the job was taken.
Douglas Adams
#16. John Cleese ... he cannot sing and keeps a locked piano in his room to prove it.
John Cleese
#17. 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
#18. What I've always wanted to do is be as funny as possible.
John Cleese
#19. And now for something completely different . . .
John Cleese
#20. The most creative people have this childlike facility to play.
John Cleese
#21. 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
#22. If you wish to kill yourself but lack the courage to, I think a visit to Palmerston North will do the trick,
John Cleese
#23. Manuel will show you to your rooms - if you're lucky.
John Cleese
#24. It's easier to be creative if you've got other people to play with.
John Cleese
#25. 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.
John Cleese
#26. Tension is wonderful for making people laugh.
John Cleese
#27. OTTO. Apes don't read philosophy.
WANDA. Yes they do, Otto. They just don't understand it.
John Cleese
#28. Only an obsessional procrastinator would cry, 'Let's run for our lives, but not till Wednesday afternoon.' Back
John Cleese
#29. Yes, I know it's easy to make fun of the organised churches, but has it occurred to anyone to wonder why it's so easy?
John Cleese
#30. I've always found life quite difficult to explain to people or to myself.
John Cleese
#31. I can do anything I want, I'm eccentric!
John Cleese
#32. 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.
John Cleese
#33. It was an astonishing fantasy but it showed me what even apparently sensible people can believe if they really want to. I
John Cleese
#34. 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
#36. 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
#37. It's a plastic surgeon you need, not a doctor
John Cleese
#38. His persona seemed very odd to me: it was as though he'd once seen an intellectual, and had spent the rest of his life impersonating him.
John Cleese
#39. The thrill I got discovering Buster Keaton when I was growing up was so exciting. He was one of the greats.
John Cleese
#40. The open mode is a mood in which curiosity for its own sake can operate, because we're not under pressure to get a specific thing done properly. We can play.
John Cleese
#41. I want to write a book which is the history of comedy.
John Cleese
#42. And so Graham and I finally got down to our first film script, and I can say with complete confidence that we had absolutely no idea what we were doing. Of course, we had no idea we had no idea what we were doing, and that meant our enthusiasm stayed intact.
John Cleese
#43. The sad thing about true stupidity is that you can do absolutely nothing about it.
John Cleese
#44. 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
#45. I have several times made a poor choice by avoiding a necessary confrontation.
John Cleese
#47. What have the Romans ever done for us?
John Cleese
#48. Telling people how to be creative is easy - being creative is difficult.
John Cleese
#49. I could see (though not as clearly as I do now) that one of my biggest problems was me. Because I wanted everyone to like me and to approve of me, I tried to be nice to everyone all the time and this proved a remarkably efficient way of losing control over my life.
John Cleese
#50. I could take an umbrella and balance it on my chin or on my foot. And I just got interested in that kind of thing. And as I played games more and more and got stronger physically, I just became more coordinated.
John Cleese
#51. 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?
John Cleese
#52. I've always called myself a writer/performer, not an actor because I basically write what I perform.
John Cleese
#53. 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
#54. Toffs could get up to speed. But Ben at least knew roughly
John Cleese
#55. 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
#56. 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.
John Cleese
#57. Yes it's her husband. She hasn't got over it. Died thirty years ago.
John Cleese
#58. 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
#59. 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.
John Cleese
#60. 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
#61. So . . . suddenly there were no tapes of The 1948 Show. It was no more. It was an ex-series.
John Cleese
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. A man will give up almost anything except his suffering.
John Cleese
#66. Finally one evening somebody suggested Python (a great name for an untrustworthy impresario, I thought), someone else added Monty, which had connotations of our greatest World War II general, there was hysteria, and history was made. A
John Cleese
#67. True, there was a vague assumption that doing so would bring me closer to God, but then who was God when he was at home? And why did he keep losing it with his chosen people, when he could easily have changed his mind, and picked a more co-operative bunch?
John Cleese
#68. While you're being creative, nothing is wrong. There's no such thing as a mistake, and any drivel may lead to the breakthrough.
John Cleese
#69. Whose fault is it, then? Dennis Compton's (Basil Fawlty)
John Cleese
#70. Cats are very intelligent at all the things that cats need to be intelligent about.
John Cleese
#71. 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.
John Cleese
#72. When we hold a World Championship for a particular sport, we invite teams from other countries to play as well.
John Cleese
#73. 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.
John Cleese
#74. My mum died about three years ago at the age of 101, and just towards the end, as she began to run out of energy, she did actually stop trying to tell me what to do most of the time.
John Cleese
#75. Your Mother was A Hamster
and you Father Smelled of elder berries
John Cleese
#76. 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.
John Cleese
#77. Laughter destroys any divisions between people.
John Cleese
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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.
John Cleese
#81. 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
#82. 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.
John Cleese
#83. 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
#84. 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.
John Cleese
#85. 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
#87. 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
#88. (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
#89. 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
#90. If you are leaping a ravine, the moment of takeoff is a bad time to be considering alternative strategies.
John Cleese
#91. Oh, I could spend my life having this conversation - look - please try to understand before one of us dies
John Cleese
#92. 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.
John Cleese
#93. 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.
John Cleese
#94. I think that I feel an indignation when I don't understand something.
John Cleese
#95. I don't miss London much. I find it crowded, vast and difficult to get around. Cabs are incredibly expensive.
John Cleese
#96. A wonderful thing about true laughter is that it just destroys any kind of system of dividing people.
John Cleese
#97. 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
#98. 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?
John Cleese
#99. Well, the only way I can get a leading-man role is if I write it.
John Cleese
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
