John Cleese > Quotes

“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.”
― John Cleese

“He who laughs most, learns best”
― John Cleese

“Life is a terminal disease, and it is sexually transmitted.”
― John Cleese, Life and How to Survive It

“The idea that you have to be protected from any kind of uncomfortable emotion is what I absolutely do not subscribe to.”
― John Cleese

“And now for something completely different . . . ”
― John Cleese

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

“If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play”
― John Cleese

“Too many people confuse being serious with being solemn.”
― John Cleese

“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.”
― John Cleese

“I think that 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. All of which are egotistical attitudes. So how can you have an egotistical organization trying to teach a non-egotistical ideal? It makes no sense, unless you regard religion as crowd control. What I think most organized religion—simply crowd control.”
― John Cleese

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

“Graham Chapman, co-author of the "Parrot Sketch", is no more. He has ceased to be. Bereft of life, he rests in peace. He's kicked the bucket, hopped the twig, bit the dust, snuffed it, breathed his last, and gone to meet the great Head of Light Entertainment in the sky. And I guess that we're all thinking how sad it is that a man of such talent, of such capability for kindness, of such unusual intelligence, should now so suddenly be spirited away at the age of only forty-eight, before he'd achieved many of the things of which he was capable, and before he'd had enough fun. Well, I feel that I should say: nonsense. Good riddance to him, the freeloading bastard, I hope he fries. And the reason I feel I should say this is he would never forgive me if I didn't, if I threw away this glorious opportunity to shock you all on his behalf. Anything for him but mindless good taste.
(He paused, then claimed that Chapman had whipered in his ear while he was writing the speech):
All right, Cleese. You say you're very proud of being the very first person ever to say 'shit' on British television. If this service is really for me, just for starters, I want you to become the first person ever at a British memorial service to say 'fuck'.”
― John Cleese

“It's not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand. ~ Brian Stimpson, Clockwise
”
― John Cleese

“Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.”
― John Cleese

“How to defend yourself against a banana”
― John Cleese

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

“I can do anything I want, I'm eccentric!”
― 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

“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.”
― John Cleese

“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

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

“I noticed years ago that when people (myself definitely included) are anxious they tend to busy themselves with irrelevant activities, because these distract from and therefore reduce their actual experience of anxiety. To stay perfectly still is to feel the fear at its maximum intensity, so instead you scuttle around doing things as though you are, in some mysterious way, short of time.”
― John Cleese, So, Anyway...

“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

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

“Cats are very intelligent at all the things that cats need to be intelligent about.”
― John Cleese, So, Anyway...

“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, So Anyway

“Laughter is a force for democracy.”
― John Cleese

“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

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

“Your Mother was A Hamster
and you Father Smelled of elder berries”
― John Cleese