John Cleese Quotes

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John Cleese

Profession : Actor

Birth : October 27, 1939

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

Wine is wonderful stuff. But so many people are put off by the snobbery of it.

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

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

John Cleese

I used to desire many, many things, but now I have just one desire, and that's to get rid of all my other desires.

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

Some actors, I think, want to feel that they are as creative as the writer. And the answer is, frankly, they're not.

John Cleese

It seems astounding to me now that the video games are perhaps as important as the movie themselves. And people will spend 2 or 3 years obsessing about the video game in exactly the same way that they'd be obsessing about the movie if they were working on that.

John Cleese

God was treated like this powerful, erratic, rather punitive father who has to be pacified and praised. You know, flattered.

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

Michael Palin decided to give up on his considerable comedy talents to make those dreadfully tedious travel shows. Have you ever tried to watch one?

John Cleese

I just think that sometimes we hang onto people or relationships long after they've ceased to be of any use to either of you. I'm always meeting new people, and my list of friends seems to change quite a bit.

John Cleese

I tend to have an odd split in my mind: I tend to look at it as a writer and when the writing thing is OK and I'm happy with it, then I put on my actor's hat.

John Cleese

For me, the great problem growing up in England was that I had a very narrow concept of what God can be, and it was damn close to an old man with a beard.

John Cleese

I can't tell you how scary it can be walking onto a movie and suddenly joining this family, it's like going to somebody else's Christmas dinner, everyone knows everyone, and you're there and you're not quite sure what you're supposed to be doing.

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 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

English television from the Fifties to the Nineties was the least bad in the world, and now it's just as bad as it is anywhere.

John Cleese

When the target audience is American teenage kids, you can have problems. My generation prized really fine acting and writing. Sometimes you have to go back to the basic principles which underpin great visual comedy.

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