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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

John Cleese Quotes

I’m always meeting new people, and my list of friends seems to change quite a bit.

– John Cleese

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.

– John Cleese

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

– John Cleese

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.

– John Cleese

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?

– John Cleese

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.

– John Cleese

A man will give up almost anything except his suffering.

– John Cleese

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

– John Cleese

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

– John Cleese

Most of the bad taste I’ve been accused of has been generic bad taste; it’s been making fun of an idea as opposed to a person.

– John Cleese

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.

– John Cleese

I can never do better than Fawlty Towers whatever I do. Now I very much want to teach young talent some rules of the game.

– John Cleese

The most creative people have this childlike facility to play.

– John Cleese

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.

– John Cleese

He who laughs most, learns best.

– John Cleese

When you’ve been doing comedy for forty years, you really do know most of the jokes. And even if you don’t know a specific joke, you can pretty much guess what it’s going to be.

– John Cleese

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

– John Cleese

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.

– John Cleese

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

– John Cleese

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

– John Cleese

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.

– John Cleese

I think you can write very good comedy without a partner, but what I love about it, working with a partner, is that you get to places you’d never get on your own. It’s like when God was designing the world and decided we couldn’t have children without a partner; it was a way of mixing up the genes so you’d get a more interesting product.

– John Cleese

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