John Cleese Quotes (38 Quotes)

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.

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.

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.

He who laughs most, learns best.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Comedy always works best when it is mean-spirited.

A man will give up almost anything except his suffering.

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.

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.

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.

I started to make harder jokes before anyone else did. And the producers would get anxious. They'd say, 'That's a little bit hard-edged, isn't it' And I'd say, 'Let's just try it and see how the audience reacts. If they don't like it, let's cut it out.' And the audience roared with laughter, so I learned you could do this harder humor and people loved it.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

is rooted in his gluttony.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

The English contribution to world cuisine - the chip.

It is absolutely impossible to get even a majority of us together in a room, and I'm not joking. It just happens very, very seldom -- every three years or something.

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.