328 Quotes by John Cleese

You can’t make Christ funny. He’s self-aware, he’s too flexible within the situation. It’s rigidity, it’s when the ego takes over and the behavior becomes inappropriate that it becomes funny.

I’ve always found life quite difficult to explain to people or to myself.

The writing is the most important bit, and performing it is just closing the circle because I’m less likely to screw it up than anyone else.

I guess 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... 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.

The greatest killer of creativity is interruption. It pulls your mind away from what you want to be thinking about. Research has shown that, after an interruption, it can take eight minutes for you to return to your previous state of consciousness, and up to twenty minutes to get back into a state of deep focus.

Ask yourself, “When does this decision have to be taken?” and having answered it, defer the decision until then, in order to give yourself maximum pondering time.

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.

The anthropologist Gregory Bateson once said, “You can’t have a new idea ’til you’ve got rid of an old one.

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