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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

...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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

He who laughs most, learns best.

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

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

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.

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.

Political correctness is a bit like a granny, a maiden aunt arriving at a party when everyone's having a good time. And she comes in, they all start sort of buttoning up and becoming self-conscious and behaving properly and then when she leaves, you can have fun again.

How to defend yourself against a banana

Comedy always works best when it is mean-spirited.

A man will give up almost anything except his suffering.

The English contribution to world cuisine: the chip.

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.

Now most people do not want an ordinary life in which they do a job well, earn the respect of their collaborators and competitors, bring up a family and have friends. That's not enough any more, and I think that is absolutely tragic - and I'm not exaggerating - that people feel like a decent, ordinary, fun life is no longer enough.

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

Bureaucrats shouldn't be in charge of comedy.

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.

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