A man will give up almost anything except his suffering.
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

Comedy always works best when it is mean-spirited.
John Cleese

Don't let anyone tell you what you ought to like... Some wines that some experts think are absolutely exquisite don't appeal to me at all.
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

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

He who laughs most, learns best.
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

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

I find it rather easy to portray a businessman. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me.
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

I think that sometimes you do something that makes a small group of people laugh, which is all we were trying to do; we were just trying to make each other laugh.
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 want to write a book which is the history of comedy.
John Cleese

I was very sad to hear of the death of Ronnie Barker, who was such a warm, friendly and encouraging presence to have when I started in television. He was also a great comic actor to learn from.
John Cleese

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

If I can get you to laugh with me, you like me better, which makes you more open to my ideas. And if I can persuade you to laugh at the particular point I make, by laughing at it you acknowledge its truth.
John Cleese

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

If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.
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