Top 35 John Cleese Quotes

A man will give up almost anything except his suffering.

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

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

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.

I want to write a book which is the history of comedy.

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.

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

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.

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.

I’m not saying Obama is right on everything. Of course not. He may be wrong on a number of things. But what I do know is that he behaves like a very, very sane man almost all the time.

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

If life were fair, Dan Quayle would be making a living asking ‘Do you want fries with that?’

Comedy always works best when it is mean-spirited.

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

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.

He who laughs most, learns best.

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.

I can’t tell you how scary it can be walking onto a movie and suddenly joining this family, it’s like going to somebody else’s Christmas dinner, everyone knows everyone, and you’re there and you’re not quite sure what you’re supposed to be doing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Michael Palin decided to give up on his considerable comedy talents to make those dreadfully tedious travel shows. Have you ever tried to watch one?

The English contribution to world cuisine – the chip.

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.

I don’t miss London much. I find it crowded, vast and difficult to get around. Cabs are incredibly expensive.

I love having different cultures around, but when the parent culture kind of dissipates, you’re left thinking, ‘Well, what’s going on?’

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.

English television from the Fifties to the Nineties was the least bad in the world, and now it’s just as bad as it is anywhere.

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

Well, the only way I can get a leading-man role is if I write it.

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

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.

I was always a sports nut but I’ve lost interest now in whether one bunch of mercenaries in north London is going to beat another bunch of mercenaries from west London.

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