328 Quotes by John Cleese

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him enter regional distribution codes in data field 97 to facilitate regression analysis on the back end.

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.

My mum died about three years ago at the age of 101, and just towards the end, as she began to run out of energy, she did actually stop trying to tell me what to do most of the time.

I think it's because in America you always get the sense that if you fail, you can just pack up your things and go somewhere else and try again. But in England, it's so geographically small that if somebody succeeds here, it reduces your chances of succeeding.

When I was a child and I was upset about something, my mother was not capable of containing that emotion, of letting me be upset but reassuring me, of just being with me in a calming way. She always got in a flap, so I not only had my own baby panics, fears and terrors to deal with, but I had to cope with hers, too. Eventually I taught myself to remain calm when I was panicked, in order not to upset her. In a way, she had managed to put me in charge of her. At 18 months old, I was doing the parenting.

That's a lovely experience when you make an audience laugh. Then the nerves go away for a bit. And sometimes you do things then that you've never done before that are really funny.

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 started to make harder jokes before anyone else did. And the producers would get anxious. They'd say, 'That's a little bit hard-edged, isn't it?' And I'd say, 'Let's just try it and see how the audience reacts. If they don't like it, let's cut it out.' And the audience roared with laughter, so I learned you could do this harder humor and people loved it.

Sci-fi has never really been my bag. But I do believe in a lot of weird things these days, such as synchronicity. Quantum physics suggests it's possible, so why not?