Quotes from Eric Idle

It's such fun to take a lot of people and create something silly.

The Minister of Transport issued this appeal to motorists: Can anyone give him a lift to Leicester?

Americans like to think 'Python' is how English people really are. There is an element of truth to that.

Nobody gets irony anymore, as we are now living in the post-ironic age. Once George Bush gets a library, our irony is dead.

At Cambridge, you have to kiss the vice-chancellor's fingers. But I missed out on that, 'cause I was doing a matinee. I don't want to kiss a strange man's fingers anyway.

Everybody has their own free choice to do what they want.

I love my family, my wife, my kids, my dogs, my home, my life. I am a very happy and contented man.

Life doesn't make any sense, and we all pretend it does. Comedy's job is to point out that it doesn't make sense, and that it doesn't make much difference anyway.

I love being an older comic now. It's like being an old soccer or an old baseball player. You're in the Hall of Fame and it's nice, but you're no longer that person in the limelight on the spot doing that thing.

My education was paid for by the RAF Benevolent Fund, so a charity school, run like an orphanage, with uniforms and beatings. It was tough, but it got me to Cambridge - like being a chrysalis suddenly becoming a butterfly.

If the studios paid the artists, how would they ever be able to afford the executives?

I'm drawn to things that aren't particularly popular at the time. I don't know why.

Reading Alan Zweibel makes me laugh out loud. And yet it is not a particularly funny name.