Top 198 Quotes & Sayings by John Cleese - Page 2

While you're being creative, nothing is wrong. There's no such thing as a mistake, and any drivel may lead to the breakthrough.

I think the problem with people like this is that they are so stupid that they have no idea how stupid they are.

No hope for planet at all. But I will be gone before the planet is gone, so it's your problem.

Muslims, who have a completely different value system, come to the West, then they should accept that there are certain basic values in the West intrinsic to our culture. Just as I wouldn't suggest that any Westerner walk down the streets of Saudi Arabia in a bikini.

Don't let anyone tell you what you ought to like.

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.

Aping urbanity, Oozing with vanity, Plump as a manatee, Faking humanity, Intellectual inanity, Journalistic calamity, Fox Noise insanity, You're a profanity, Hannity.

I'm not sure what's going on in Britain. I don't know what's going on in London. Because London is no longer an English city, and that's how they got the Olympics. I mean, they said, "We're the most cosmopolitan city on Earth," but it doesn't feel English.

I don't want to have to start being unselfish again. The great thing about being on your own is you do what you damned well like.

Oh, I could spend my life having this conversation - look - please try to understand before one of us dies

If you want to know who your friends are, have a major failure.

The most creative people have learned to tolerate the slight discomfort of indecision for much longer and so, just because they put in more pondering time, their solutions are more creative.

If I like chocolate it won't surprise you that I have a few chocolates in my fridge, but if you find out I've got 16 warehouses full of chocolate, you'd think I was insane. All these rich guys are insane, obsessive compulsive twits obsessed with money - money is all they think about - they're all nuts.

I get bored easily. I've been bored most of my life.

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

Because, as we all know, it’s easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking. And it’s also easier to do little things we know we can do than to start on big things that we’re not so sure about.

Technology frightens me to death. It's designed by engineers to impress other engineers, and they always come with instruction booklets that are written by engineers for other engineers - which is why almost no technology ever works.

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.

Always start where the energy is.

A satisfied customer. We should have him stuffed.

The English contribution to world cuisine: the chip.

Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.

If you are leaping a ravine, the moment of takeoff is a bad time to be considering alternative strategies.

There's nothing good on the television; let's burn a witch. It must have been terribly exciting to live in those times.

Laughter destroys any divisions between people.

The one thing I remember about Christmas was that my father used to take me out in a boat about ten miles offshore on Christmas Day, and I used to have to swim back. Extraordinary. It was a ritual. Mind you, that wasn't the hard part. The difficult bit was getting out of the sack.

I think we're all born with a sense of humor. Creativity is another thing though.

And now for something completely different...

I think it takes a long time, as you get older, to realize just how crazy the world is, just how ridiculous it all is.

It’s only on the brink that people find the will to change. Only at the precipice do we evolve.

We all operate in two contrasting modes, which might be called open and closed. The open mode is more relaxed, more receptive, more exploratory, more democratic, more playful and more humorous. The closed mode is the tighter, more rigid, more hierarchical, more tunnel-visioned. Most people, unfortunately spend most of their time in the closed mode.

...when you collaborate with someone else on something creative, you get to places that you would never get to on your own. The way an idea builds as it careens back and forth between good writers is so unpredictable. Sometimes it depends on people misunderstanding each other, and that's why I don't think there's any such thing as a mistake in the creative process. You never know where it might lead.

Telling people how to be creative is easy - being creative is difficult.

This is the extraordinary thing about creativity: If just you keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way, sooner or later you will get a reward from your unconscious.

The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.

We all die at the end, but does that nullify everything? Would most people rather say, "I wish I hadn't been born?" Once you're born you'll have to die, now is that funny or sad?

We don't know where we get our ideas from. What we do know is that we do not get them from our laptops.

Too many people confuse being serious with being solemn.

If you wish to kill yourself but lack the courage to, I think a visit to Palmerston North will do the trick.

When you do comedy in front of an audience, they are the ones who tell you whether it's funny or not and which bits are funny and which bits need to be fixed.

All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

What is absurd is not the teachings of the founders of religion, it's what followers subsequently make of it.

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.

Once we've made a decision, we are efficient only if we go through with it decisively, undistracted by doubts about its correctness.

I think that the real religion is about the understanding that if we can only still our egos for a few seconds, we might have a chance of experiencing something that is divine in nature.

Why write about the past? Well, there's more of it.

If you really don't know where to start or if you're stuck, start generating random connections and allow your intuition to tell you if one might lead somewhere interesting.

This is the most important joke I've ever heard. Niels Bohr, the founder of Quantum Physics, had a friend to dinner. As the friend left, he noticed a horseshoe nailed above Bohr's front door. He said to Bohr, accusingly, "Niels, you're a great scientist. You can't believe in superstitions." Bohr answered, "I don't, but apparently it works anyway."As with confirmation bias, we tend to lean toward superstitions that benefit us.

The World is insane. With tiny spots of sanity, here and there... Not the other way around!

When people say 'I'm not a prude, but ...' what they mean is 'I am a prude, and ...'.

When you get to my age, and I'm 66 now, you realize that the world is a madhouse and that most people are operating in fantasy anyway. So once you realise that, it doesn't bother you much.

Give your mind as long as possible to come up with something original.

My views are heretical to people who believe in political correctness.

I learned a lot of things about literature talking to people at the publishing company. Did you know that about 90 percent of celebrity autobiographies are ghostwritten?

I think humor is incredibly positive, I think it is life advancing. There's medical research to show that it improves your antibodies. It's all about sense and perspective.

The very essence of playfulness is an openness to anything that may happen, the feeling that whatever happens, it's okay... you're either free to play, or you're not.

The Americans are so much more positive. They are much more in love with success. In Britain, they're a fairly envious bunch, and they love it if you fail.

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.

When I was in school, I was beaten every 30 minutes. It never did me any harm except for some psychological mal-adjustments and blurred vision.

To be creative you must create a space for yourself where you can be undisturbed... separate from everyday concerns.