Quotes from John Cleese

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

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.

He who laughs most, learns best

Life is a terminal disease, and it is sexually transmitted.

And now for something completely different . . .

The idea that you have to be protected from any kind of uncomfortable emotion is what I absolutely do not subscribe to.

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

Nothing will stop you being creative more effectively as the fear of making a mistake.

Too many people confuse being serious with being solemn.

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.

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

It's not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand. ~ Brian Stimpson, Clockwise

How to defend yourself against a banana

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

I noticed years ago that when people (myself definitely included) are anxious they tend to busy themselves with irrelevant activities, because these distract from and therefore reduce their actual experience of anxiety. To stay perfectly still is to feel the fear at its maximum intensity, so instead you scuttle around doing things as though you are, in some mysterious way, short of time.

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

The sad thing about true stupidity is that you can do absolutely nothing about it.

Laughter is a force for democracy.

Cats are very intelligent at all the things that cats need to be intelligent about.