John Cleese Quotes & Sayings

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

Nothing will stop you being creative more effectively as the fear of making a
mistake. — John Cleese

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. — John Cleese

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

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. — John Cleese

What's the bleedin' point? — John Cleese

Laughter is a force for democracy. — John Cleese

I can do anything I want, I'm eccentric! — John Cleese

Comedy always works best when it is mean-spirited. — John Cleese

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

Telling people how to be creative is easy - being creative is difficult. — John Cleese

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

I once compiled a list of events that frightened her, and it was quite comprehensive: very loud snoring; low-flying aircraft; church bells; fire engines; trains; buses and lorries; thunder; shouting; large cars; most medium-sized cars; noisy small cars; burglar alarms; fireworks, especially crackers; loud radios; barking dogs; whinnying horses; nearby silent horses; cows in general; megaphones; sheep; corks coming out of sparkling wine bottles; motorcycles, even very small ones; balloons being popped; vacuum cleaners (not being used by her); things being dropped; dinner gongs; parrot houses; whoopee cushions; chiming doorbells; hammering; bombs; hooters; old-fashioned alarm clocks; pneumatic drills; and hairdryers (even those used by her). — John Cleese

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. — John Cleese

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

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

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

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

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

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. — John Cleese

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

Loving your neighbour as much as yourself is practically bloody impossible? You might as well have a commandment that states,'Thou shalt fly'. — John Cleese

Years ago we would have been burned for this. Now what I am suggesting is that we've advanced. — John Cleese

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

We left the Bentley and Tim at a garage, and Alan and I travelled back to Brussels to hire a much less magnificent vehicle. When we picked Tim up the next morning, he told us that he'd spent the night in his room with a 'bird'. Intrigued, we questioned him closely, and learned that he had been woken in the middle of the night by a strange, rather alarming noise and that when he had put the light on he had discovered a turkey vomiting on the mantelpiece. He'd thought of complaining but found that his phrase book did not cover this contingency. — John Cleese

Give your mind as long as possible to come up with something original. — John Cleese

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

Whose fault is it, then? Dennis Compton's (Basil Fawlty) — John Cleese

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

A good sense of humour is the sign of a healthy perspective, which is why people who are uncomfortable around humour are either pompous (inflated) or neurotic (oversensitive). Pompous people mistrust humour because at some level they know their self-importance cannot survive very long in such an atmosphere, so they criticise it as "negative" or "subversive." Neurotics, sensing that humour is always ultimately critical, view it as therefore unkind and destructive, a reductio ad absurdum which leads to political correctness. Not that laughter can't be unkind and destructive. Like most manifestations of human behaviour it ranges from the loving to the hateful. The latter produces nasty racial jokes and savage teasing; the former, warm and affectionate banter, and the kind of inclusive humour that says, "Isn't the human condition absurd, but we're all in the same boat. — John Cleese

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

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

The Americans are just more enthusiastic and more likely to engage in hyperbole. — John Cleese

Life is a terminal disease, and it is sexually transmitted. — John Cleese

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. — John Cleese

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. — John Cleese

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

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

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

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

I think that money spoils most things, once it becomes the primary motivating force. — John Cleese

My education, in other words, was a test of my willpower; and I accepted the challenge - to such an extent, indeed, that I think at some level of my teenage consciousness I truly believed that the whole point of going to school was to learn how to focus attention on subject matter that was of no consequence to me. The message I received at Clifton was: education is not primarily about understanding the world; its real purpose is character-building. As a corollary, I inferred that to study anything in which you had a real interest was, if not exactly cheating, certainly missing the point. — John Cleese

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

Filming is like a long air journey: there's so much hanging around and boredom that they keep giving you food. — John Cleese

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

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

In Britain, girls seem to be either bright or attractive. In America, that's not the case. They're both. — John Cleese

The French have so many civil wars, they can win one now and again. — John Cleese

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

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

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. — John Cleese

I greatly admire first-class mimics' super-sensitive powers of observation, the extraordinary accuracy with which they observe vocal production, inflexions, rhythms of speech, facial expressions and body language, all those tiny, unique traits which they can then reproduce so precisely. But I also can't help wondering whether they are, unconsciously, observing others closely in the hope they can find something there that they can "borrow" and incorporate into their own personality structure, to strengthen their sense of self. Perhaps it's an extreme form of the desire most people display early in their lives to find role models. Of course, once impersonators have developed this ability, they are rewarded by the delight they produce in an audience, whether they are at a party with friends, or earning a living on television, so they have no reason to stop, even though its original purpose has never really been accomplished. — John Cleese

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. — John Cleese

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

The first time it was my turn to do the shopping, I overindulged my growing taste for exotic food with a bagful of goodies like smoked elk's liver and chocolate-covered ants and mackerel-and-prune soup and curried walrus testicles. I'd sort of forgotten about the milk and the bread and the eggs. I was never allowed to shop again. — John Cleese

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

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

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

Solemnity, I don't know what it's for. I mean, what is the point of it? The two most beautiful memorial services that I've ever attended both had a lot of humor. It somehow freed us all and made the services inspiring and cathartic. But solemnity, it serves pomposity. The self important always know at some level of their consciousness that their egotism is going to be punctured by humor. That's why they see it as a threat! And so, dishonestly, they pretend that their deficiency makes their views more substantial. — John Cleese

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

Although I had good hand-eye coordination, I was so tall and skinny and muscularly weak that I just was not well coordinated. But what I started to do quite early on was watch some of the great old silent comedians, like Laurel and Hardy and Chaplin, and then later on Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. — John Cleese

What is absurd is not the teachings of the founders of religion, it's what followers subsequently make of it. — John Cleese

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

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

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

Mother told me once that some Westonians privately criticised Dad for retreating so soon. They apparently felt it would have been more dignified to have waited a week or so before running away. I think this view misses the essential point of running away, which is to do it the moment the idea has occurred to you. Only an obsessional procrastinator would cry, Let's run for our lives, but not till Wednesday afternoon. — John Cleese

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. — John Cleese

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

Technology frightens me to death. It's designed by engineers to impress other engineers. And they always come with instruction booklets that are written by engineers for other engineers - which is why almost no technology ever works. — John Cleese

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. — John Cleese

A man will give up almost anything except his suffering. — John Cleese

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

It's a plastic surgeon you need, not a doctor — John Cleese

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. But in order to do that, we have to slice away at our egos and try to get them down to a manageable size, and then still work some practiced light meditation. So real religion is about reducing our egos, whereas all the churches are interested in is egotistical activities, like getting as many members and raising as much money and becoming as important and high-profile and influential as possible. — John Cleese

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

And it was this location that provides my second memory. (It must come after the first because in it I am now standing up.) I was bitten by a rabbit. Or rather, I was nibbled by a rabbit, but, because I was such a weedy, namby-pamby little pansy, I reacted as though I'd lost a limb. It was the sheer unfairness of it all that so upset me. One minute, I was saying, 'Hello, Mr Bunny!' and smiling at its sweet little face and funny floppy ears. The next, the fucker savaged me. It seemed so gratuitous. What, I asked myself, had I done to the rabbit to deserve this psychotic response? — John Cleese

It was not fair and therefore unworthy of my respect. It was as simple as that. — John Cleese

But now I began to notice odd moments that suggested he was not the brightest lighthouse on the coastline. For instance, he once got very cross during assembly because he felt the boys had become lazy, and so he demanded that every single boy in the school should improve his ranking in class in the course of the next fortnight. — John Cleese

Creativity is not a talent; it's a way of operating. — John Cleese

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

The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else. — John Cleese

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

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

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

Too many people confuse being serious with being solemn. — John Cleese

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. — John Cleese

So, creatively, I was doubly blessed: constant relocation and parental disharmony. Add to these two gifts the well-established fact that many of the world's greatest geniuses, both artistic and scientific, have been the product of serious maternal deprivation, and I am forced to the conclusion that if only my mother had been just a little more emotionally inadequate, I could have been HUGE. — John Cleese

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

The sad thing about true stupidity is that you can do absolutely nothing about it. — John Cleese

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

I get bored easily. I've been bored most of my life. — John Cleese

You have to create boundaries of space and then you have to create boundaries of time. — John Cleese

In my view, ordinary everyday sanity is harder for "only children" to achieve: they have nothing to moderate or dilute a parent's influence. It must be very liberating to be able to share your parents' attention, and indeed to have fellow offspring with whom you can actually discuss parental behaviour. I'm sure I could have dramatically cut the hours I spent in therapy if I had had a brother (or, better still, a sister) to whom I could have turned and asked, "What the hell has got into her today? — John Cleese

I was a terrible dancer. I dance like an Englishman. — John Cleese

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

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

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

Mrs. Richards: Girl, there's no paper in my room. Why don't you check these things? That's what you're being paid for, isn't it?
Polly: We don't put it in the rooms.
Mrs. Richards: What?
Polly: Well, we keep it in the lounge.
Mrs. Richards: [aghast] In the lounge?
Polly: I'll get you some. Do you want plain ones or ones with our address on it?
Mrs. Richards: Address on it?
Polly: How many sheets? Well, how many are you going to use?
Mrs. Richards: Manager! — John Cleese

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. — John Cleese

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