John Cleese Quotes

119 quotes in 1323 categories

• If you wish to kill yourself but lack the courage to, I think a visit to Palmerston North will do the trick,
• It’s only on the brink that people find the will to change. Only at the precipice do we evolve.
• I tend to have an odd split in my mind: I tend to look at it as a writer and when the writing thing is…
• What have the Romans ever done for us?
• I find the Alexander Technique very helpful in my work. Things happen without you trying. They get to be light and relaxed. You must get…
• Basil Fawlty was an easy character for me. For some reason, portraying a mean uptight incompetent bully comes naturally to me.
• Filming is like a long air journey: there's so much hanging around and boredom that they keep giving you food.
• My hovercraft is full of eels.
• 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…
• If you are leaping a ravine, the moment of takeoff is a bad time to be considering alternative strategies.
• You have to create boundaries of space and then you have to create boundaries of time.
• The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.
• Would you take a billion dollars, if as part of the deal the Earth were made uninhabitable a year after your death? ... well, of…
• 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…
• Telling people how to be creative is easy - being creative is difficult.
• When you're being stalked by an angry mob with raspberries, the first thing to do is to release a tiger.
• Either people walk round dressed as chickens or they listen to Beethoven.
• I want to write a book which is the history of comedy.
• If you really don't know where to start or if you're stuck, start generating random connections and allow your intuition to tell you if one…
• It's easier to be creative if you've got other people to play with.

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