John Cleese Quotes

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.

What have the Romans ever done for us?

All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

The most creative people have this childlike facility to play.

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

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

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

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.

If I can get you to laugh with me, you like me better, which makes you open to my ideas

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

He who laughs most, learns best.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

A man will give up almost anything except his suffering.

How to defend yourself against a banana

Comedy always works best when it is mean-spirited.

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.

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

The English contribution to world cuisine: the chip.

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.

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

Bureaucrats shouldn't be in charge of comedy.

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

My hovercraft is full of eels.

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.

A satisfied customer. We should have him stuffed.

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

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

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?

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