John Cleese
44 quotes
Biography
John Marwood Cleese is an English actor, comedian, screenwriter, producer, and presenter. Emerging from the Cambridge Footlights in the 1960s, he first achieved success at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and as a scriptwriter and performer on The Frost Report.
"This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot. It's a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn't nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies. It's rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot."
"It's not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand. ~ Brian Stimpson, Clockwise"
"Four hundred years ago, we would have been burnt for this film. Now, I'm suggesting that we've made an advance."
"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."
"Basil Fawlty was an easy character for me. For some reason, portraying a mean, uptight, incompetent bully comes naturally to me."
"If I had not gone into Monty Python, I probably would have stuck to my original plan to graduate and become a chartered accountant, perhaps a barrister lawyer, and gotten a nice house in the suburbs, with a nice wife and kids, and gotten a country club membership, and then I would have killed myself."
"He who laughs most, learns best."
"I'm struck by how laughter connects you with people. It's almost impossible to maintain any kind of distance or any sense of social hierarchy when you're just howling with laughter. Laughter is a force for democracy."
"If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play."
"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."
"If God did not intend for us to eat animals, then why did he make them out of meat?"
"You see, you could never do a sketch like that these days. The audience is too uninformed. I blame the Americans. Nation of obese, violent, pig-ignorant, bible-thumping morons contaminating world culture. That’s why I spend most of my time here in France. … Beautiful, isn’t it? Just look at those olive trees. [Interviewer: This is Santa Barbara.]"
"My biggest regret? Not being knighted by the Queen. I should have been a knight, and I would have been knighted, if I hadn't written one horrible horrible Python sketch which I deeply deeply regret — [cue Python sketch: "Upper Class Twit of the Year"]"
"When you get to my age, and I'm 66 now, you realize that the world is a madhouse and that most people are operating in fantasy anyway. So once you realise that, it doesn't bother you much."
"Because these people are operating at a very very low level of mental health, they are incapable of understanding the teaching."
"A wonderful thing about true laughter is that it just destroys any kind of system of dividing people."
"When I was teaching, the headmaster told me "You know, the sad thing about true stupidity is that you can do absolutely nothing about it.""
"All humans are stupid, but the smarter ones at least have a handle on their own ignorance."
"I had a very strange experience in our stage tour. I'm sure that they all remember it differently, but I remember we started off in Brighton and worked our way front to the Midlands, and we were doing a show in Bristol, and we were doing a matinee there, and for some extraordinary reason the audience just didn't laugh. So after about four sketches of this Bristol matinee audience not laughing at something that people had been falling around at for two weeks, I realized that they were right and that it wasn't funny. And I'm being perfectly serious: if people aren't laughing, it isn't funny. And then the next house came in in the evening, and they started to laugh again in all the right places, and the show became funny again. But I mean comedy is incredibly brittle, and if something goes wrong with the atmosphere, you're dead."
"...what happens as you get older, and I promise you I'm not exaggerating, is that you begin to realize, first of all, that almost nobody knows what they're doing or what they’re talking about."
"Cleese, who enjoyed a fairly traditional, upper-middle-class upbringing, has dedicated his career to subverting the very same traditional British society which both molded him and projected him into the limelight. He has been enormously popular, in part because the British middle and upper class tend to enjoy that small moral relief which they experience through laughing at themselves. Christianity, nationalism and class have all come under Cleese’s satirical gaze while he continued to enjoy the fruits of the middle-class existence that he so tenaciously and profitably chipped away at. Now, like so many Boomers, he finds himself in the crumbling ruins of that same soppy-stern society, wishing that it would return, if only partially, and has begun a late-life declaration of war against political correctness, multiculturalism and the ‘loony left’ for which he is partly responsible."
"My compulsion to always be working has become less strong and my current business is purely down to this enormous alimony. If I wasn't doing this I'd be making documentaries about wildlife and other subjects that interest me."
"You don't have to be the Dalai Lama to tell people that life's about change."
"I just think that sometimes we hang onto people or relationships long after they've ceased to be of any use to either of you. I'm always meeting new people, and my list of friends seems to change quite a bit."
"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."