John Cleese

If I can get you to laugh with me, you like me better, which makes you open to my ideas

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.

If you are leaping a ravine, the moment of takeoff is a bad time to be considering alternative strategies.

In Britain, girls seem to be either bright or attractive. In America, that's not the case. They're both.

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.

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.

Well, the only way I can get a leading-man role is if I write it.

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.

The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.

Aping urbanity, _x000D_ Oozing with vanity, _x000D_ Plump as a manatee, _x000D_ Faking humanity, _x000D_ Intellectual inanity, _x000D_ Journalistic calamity, _x000D_ Fox Noise insanity, _x000D_ You're a profanity, _x000D_ Hannity.

When you get to my age, and I'm 66 now, you realize that the world is a madhouse and that most people are operating in fantasy anyway. So once you realise that, it doesn't bother you much.

Sci-fi has never really been my bag. But I do believe in a lot of weird things these days, such as synchronicity. Quantum physics suggests it's possible, so why not?

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.

Would you take a billion dollars, if as part of the deal the Earth were made uninhabitable a year after your death? ... well, of course not; you care about your friends, above all your children, any grandchildren. But ... what if the deal calls for the planet to be poisoned a thousand years later? We feel strong obligations to generations in the near future - should we not feel the same way about our children's great-grandchildren and generations beyond them?

I love having different cultures around, but when the parent culture kind of dissipates, you're left thinking, 'Well, what's going on?'

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.

The really good idea is always traceable back quite a long way, often to a not very good idea which sparked off another idea that was only slightly better, which somebody else misunderstood in such a way that they then said something which was really rather interesting.

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.

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.

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 not quite sure what you're supposed to sit.

But then acting is all about faking. We're all very good at faking things that we have no competence with.