328 Quotes by John Cleese

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.

His persona seemed very odd to me: it was as though he’d once seen an intellectual, and had spent the rest of his life impersonating him.

Filming is like a long air journey: there’s so much hanging around and boredom that they keep giving you food.

So, creatively, I was doubly blessed: constant relocation and parental disharmony. Add to these two gifts the well-established fact that many of the world’s greatest geniuses, both artistic and scientific, have been the product of serious maternal deprivation, and I am forced to the conclusion that if only my mother had been just a little more emotionally inadequate, I could have been HUGE.

I think the hard thing for young comedians is that the majority of the young people in the audience out there don’t have the wide range of references.

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

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 OK and I’m happy with it, then I put on my actor’s hat.

There’s something about watching an animal that puts you in contact with where we came from and what we’re still a part of.

One of our professors described a lecture as ‘a mystical process by which the notes on the pad of the lecturer pass on to the pad of the student, without passing through the mind of either’.