Quotes from John Cleese

The Goon Show

Put simply, you can't ask your unconscious a question, and expect a direct answer—a neat, tidy little verbal message.

When you're being creative there is no such thing as a mistake.

As Hindus say, the mind is like a chattering, drunken monkey.

The first time it was my turn to do the shopping, I overindulged my growing taste for exotic food with a bagful of goodies like smoked elk's liver and chocolate-covered ants and mackerel-and-prune soup and curried walrus testicles. I'd sort of forgotten about the milk and the bread and the eggs. I was never allowed to shop again.

Finally one evening somebody suggested Python (a great name for an untrustworthy impresario, I thought), someone else added Monty, which had connotations of our greatest World War II general, there was hysteria, and history was made. A

but now I began to notice odd moments that suggested he was not the brightest lighthouse on the coastline. For instance, he once got very cross during assembly because he felt the boys had become lazy, and so he demanded that every single boy in the school should improve his ranking in class in the course of the next fortnight.

I'd arrived after the matinee and still remember an autograph hunter at the stagedoor asking me, 'Are you anybody?' I was tempted to answer him ontologically, but instead told him a white lie, and denied my own existence.)

So . . . suddenly there were no tapes of The 1948 Show. It was no more. It was an ex-series.

The other person at the Frost Report table to whom I was drawn was one Marty Feldman. I hasten to add that my interest in him was platonic: in fact when I first met him, I was rather shocked by his physical appearance. Dressed only in black, heavily suntanned and very fit, he looked like an Armani gargoyle. This was the script editor?

Graham always used to say that I was shocked when he came out. That implies some sort of moral objection. Untrue. I was not 'shocked', I was very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very surprised.

And so Graham and I finally got down to our first film script, and I can say with complete confidence that we had absolutely no idea what we were doing. Of course, we had no idea we had no idea what we were doing, and that meant our enthusiasm stayed intact.

British journalists tend to believe that people who become good at something do so because they seek fame and fortune. This is because these are the sole motives of people who become British journalists.

Mrs. Richards: Girl, there's no paper in my room. Why don't you check these things? That's what you're being paid for, isn't it? Polly: We don't put it in the rooms. Mrs. Richards: What? Polly: Well, we keep it in the lounge. Mrs. Richards: [aghast] In the lounge? Polly: I'll get you some. Do you want plain ones or ones with our address on it? Mrs. Richards: Address on it? Polly: How many sheets? Well, how many are you going to use? Mrs. Richards: Manager!

Genuinely good manners are, after all, essentially a way of moderating one's own egotism, often in the service of considering the egos of others.

He (a teacher at school) was the epitome of the Oxonian code of effortless superiority whereby to be seen trying really hard to achieve something was in many ways worse than actually failing it.

John Cleese... he cannot sing and keeps a locked piano in his room to prove it.

toffs could get up to speed. But Ben at least knew roughly

The first was that the creative architects knew how to play.

The second was that the creative architects always deferred making decisions for as long as they were allowed.

But perhaps the biggest interruption coming from your inside is caused by your worrying about making a mistake.

but the insanity of punishing someone physically for getting an answer wrong. It is terrifying how much of this deeply unkind, utterly pointless, in fact, mind-bogglingly COUNTERPRODUCTIVE kind of behaviour was meted out to children over the centuries by half-witted, power-crazed zombies like this heinous old bat—a large proportion of such psychopaths allegedly acting in the name of an all-loving God

Tortoise Mind." "Hare Brain." They need each other. But keep them separate!

I made my first public appearance on the stairs up to the school nurse's room, at St. Peter's Preparatory School, Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England, on September 13, 1948.