Top 112 Quotes & Sayings by Eric Idle

I listen to the audience and try and bounce with them. All audiences are different. But they are all homo sapiens.

I love being an older comic now. It's like being an old soccer or an old baseball player. You're in the Hall of Fame and it's nice, but you're no longer that person in the limelight on the spot doing that thing.

I like the idea of being out there regularly with an audience and with a funny gang of people. That's what I grew up with - doing television, doing shows every week.

Life is a comedy when watching and a tragedy when experiencing. I try and share anything I have.

The dreadful thing about getting older is you cry at the drop of a hat.

Americans like to think 'Python' is how English people really are. There is an element of truth to that.

I do pool exercises, like weightlifting but underwater. I walk, I swim... I'm pretty fit for an old bloke.

People can tell the truth much more freely when they're apparently lying.

I like being a foreigner. For me, to live in California is very pleasant - I'm more comfortable not feeling a part of everything, not feeling responsible for the government or the roads or the health system.

At least in America, you have freedom of speech, which is a good thing. It's just a question of whether you're allowed to use it on 'Fox News'.

I'm drawn to things that aren't particularly popular at the time. I don't know why.

My education was paid for by the RAF Benevolent Fund, so a charity school, run like an orphanage, with uniforms and beatings. It was tough, but it got me to Cambridge - like being a chrysalis suddenly becoming a butterfly.

You look just like you!

I love my family, my wife, my kids, my dogs, my home, my life. I am a very happy and contented man.

It's such fun to take a lot of people and create something silly.

John Cleese once told me he'd do anything for money. So I offered him a pound to shut up, and he took it.

I love stage work. The thing about plays is that they're perfectible. With film, you shoot that take and maybe another. During 'Spamalot,' I rewrote Act II three times.

Nobody gets irony anymore, as we are now living in the post-ironic age. Once George Bush gets a library, our irony is dead.

It just seems to me that there's no particular reason comedy albums should be dead. There's a lot to laugh at. We have very funny people, still.

Talent is always more interesting - ambition is not interesting. If you have talent, you have to find ways of expressing it, but you may not be a success in the world's terms.

Life took over 4 billion years to evolve into you, and you've about 70 more years to enjoy it. Don't just pursue happiness, catch it.

I never think in terms of target audience. I try to write what makes me laugh, so I'm the target audience. I guess I just hope there's another person in America like me.

No day of my life passes without someone saying the words 'Monty Python' to me. It's not bad.

If the studios paid the artists, how would they ever be able to afford the executives?

You initially become funny as a kid because you're looking for attention and love. Psychologists think that's all to do with mother abandonment. I think John Cleese has his depressions, and Terry Gilliam's the same. All of us together make one completely insane person.

I'm more surprised than anyone that 'Spamalot's done so well. You can never predict what's going to be a hit.

I think the special thing about Python is that it's a writers' commune. The writers are in charge. The writers decide what the material is.

I've always found bad films more enjoyable than good ones.

To me, the musical is best when it's a musical comedy. So if you have a very, very funny show, and very good, funny songs, that's what the musical does best.

The Minister of Transport issued this appeal to motorists: Can anyone give him a lift to Leicester?

I won't read scripts because I have a limited amount of time. Why should I help other people do lame stuff when I can just go out and put on lame stuff of my own?

I have been very blessed in my life and rewarded with good friends and good health. I am grateful and happy to be able to share this.

A website can be very time-intensive, but I'd love to have one where people can contribute to it - like invent islands and make their own flags, and their own laws. I think that'd be kind of fun.

Probably spending 12 years at boarding school - comedy became a survival gene. But I think some people are funny right off the bat, as soon as they can speak or be naughty.

We've discovered that the less we do, the more money we make.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will make me go in a corner and cry by myself for hours.

I will jump on anybody's private plane at the drop of a hat. I'm an old-fashioned lower-middle-class boy.

I was thrilled to win a Tony in 2005 for 'Spamalot'.

Subversion is what I do.

The next step will be for the colonists on Mars to throw off the hand of the United States. There will be this wonderful historical irony. When the people on Mars write a declaration of independence saying, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident...', the US will be rather pissed off.

Even if you've written something for print, I think it's good to try [it] out on someone because it changes. You can think it's hilarious and they can tell you it's not.

Life doesn't make any sense, and we all pretend it does. Comedy's job is to point out that it doesn't make sense, and that it doesn't make much difference anyway.

A nod's as good as a wink to a blind bat!

Know what I mean? Eh, eh, Nudge nudge, Say no more?

Of the sparkling wines, the most famous is Perth Pink. This is a bottle with a message in, and the message is "beware". This is not a wine for drinking; this is a wine for laying down and avoiding.

I think you often learn from failure. Success just teaches you how great you were, but in fact it's knowing what will fail that will help you to make the right choices.

People who are interested in money are really uninteresting people. They look like Donald Trump.

Learn to trust yourself. That's very vital. ... Just stand with yourself. Remember, in his lifetime, Van Gogh sold only two paintings. I personally sold even fewer.

Pattycake, pattycake, baker's man; good morning, madam, I'm a psychiatrist

I believe in the separation of church and planet.

Executives do not on the whole do well with comedy. They can't understand it, they can't read it, they can't spot it.

Elvis saved my life when I was 13 or 14. He saved all our lives.

I pay taxes in three countries, but can't vote in any of them.

A lot has been said about politics; some of it complimentary, but most of it accurate

Bear in mind the simple rule, X squared to the power of two minus five over the seven point eight three times nineteen is approximately equal to the cube root of MCC squared divided by X minus a quarter of a third percent. Keep that in mind, and you can't go very far wrong.

Never do things for money. It's always the things you do for love that turn out to pay the best.

I've got soggy thighs. It must be dinner time.

Life has a very simple plot: first you're here and then you're not.

If anything can survive the probe of humour it is clearly of value, and conversely all groups who claim immunity from laughter are claiming special privileges which should not be granted.

Everybody has their own free choice to do what they want.