Top 180 John Cleese Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Tension is wonderful for making people laugh.”

— John Cleese

52. “Basil Fawlty was an easy character for me. For some reason, portraying a mean uptight incompetent bully comes naturally to me.”

— John Cleese

53. “Loving your neighbour as much as yourself is practically bloody impossible? You might as well have a commandment that states,‘Thou shalt fly’.”

— John Cleese

54. “When you do comedy in front of an audience, they are the ones who tell you whether it’s funny or not and which bits are funny and which bits need to be fixed.”

— John Cleese

55. “Students who laugh more- learn more. Students who laugh more earn more.”

— John Cleese

56. “The greatest killer of creativity is interruption. It pulls your mind away from what you want to be thinking about. Research has shown that, after an interruption, it can take eight minutes for you to return to your previous state of consciousness, and up to twenty minutes to get back into a state of deep focus.”

— John Cleese

57. “Why write about the past? Well, there’s more of it.”

— John Cleese

58. “The problem was that I carried around with me a tendency to feel that other people’s respect for me would vanish if what I did was second rate. And while I accept that this “perfectionism” is likely to stimulate the production of better work, it doesn’t, unfortunately, go hand in hand with a relaxed and happy attitude to life.”

— John Cleese

59. “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.”

— John Cleese

60. “I can certainly see that you know your wine. Most of the guests who stay here wouldn’t know the difference between Bordeaux and Claret.”

— John Cleese

61. “I’m struck by how laughter connects you with people. It’s almost impossible to maintain any kind of distance or any sense of social hierarchy when you’re just howling with laughter. Laughter is a force for democracy.”

— John Cleese

62. “I get bored easily. I’ve been bored most of my life.”

— John Cleese

63. “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

64. “Creativity is not an ability that you either have or do not have. It is, for example, and this may surprise you, absolutely unrelated to IQ, provided you’re intelligent above a certain minimal level.”

— John Cleese

65. “I can do anything I want, I’m eccentric!”

— John Cleese

66. “The most creative people have learned to tolerate the slight discomfort of indecision for much longer and so, just because they put in more pondering time, their solutions are more creative.”

— John Cleese

67. “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.”

— John Cleese

68. “We don’t know where we get our ideas from. What we do know is that we do not get them from our laptops.”

— John Cleese

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

— John Cleese

70. “I’m not sure what’s going on in Britain. I don’t know what’s going on in London. Because London is no longer an English city, and that’s how they got the Olympics. I mean, they said, “We’re the most cosmopolitan city on Earth,” but it doesn’t feel English.”

— John Cleese

71. “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.”

— John Cleese

72. “Sense of humor is so much more subjective than anyone believes.”

— John Cleese

73. “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.”

— John Cleese

74. “The English contribution to world cuisine – the chip.”

— John Cleese

75. “One of our professors described a lecture as ‘a mystical process by which the notes on the pad of the lecturer pass on to the pad of the student, without passing through the mind of either’.”

— John Cleese

76. “I don’t understand why very, very rich people want to have even more money than they’ve already got.”

— John Cleese

77. “I think it takes a long time, as you get older, to realize just how crazy the world is, just how ridiculous it all is.”

— John Cleese

78. “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

79. “I find the Alexander Technique very helpful in my work. Things happen without you trying. They get to be light and relaxed. You must get an Alexander teacher to show it to you.”

— John Cleese

80. “The open mode is a mood in which curiosity for its own sake can operate, because we’re not under pressure to get a specific thing done properly. We can play.”

— John Cleese

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

— John Cleese

82. “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.”

— John Cleese

83. “High creativity is responding to situations without critical thought.”

— John Cleese

84. “I think it’s because in America you always get the sense that if you fail, you can just pack up your things and go somewhere else and try again. But in England, it’s so geographically small that if somebody succeeds here, it reduces your chances of succeeding.”

— John Cleese

85. “If you want to know who your friends are, have a major failure.”

— John Cleese

86. “Michael Palin decided to give up on his considerable comedy talents to make those dreadfully tedious travel shows. Have you ever tried to watch one?”

— John Cleese

87. “When you’ve been doing comedy for forty years, you really do know most of the jokes. And even if you don’t know a specific joke, you can pretty much guess what it’s going to be.”

— John Cleese

88. “It’s too difficult to start right from scratch and try and be funny out of the blue.”

— John Cleese

89. “What is absurd is not the teachings of the founders of religion, it’s what followers subsequently make of it.”

— John Cleese

90. “I was always a sports nut but I’ve lost interest now in whether one bunch of mercenaries in north London is going to beat another bunch of mercenaries from west London.”

— John Cleese

91. “When I was in school, I was beaten every 30 minutes. It never did me any harm except for some psychological mal-adjustments and blurred vision.”

— John Cleese

92. “It’s a plastic surgeon you need, not a doctor.”

— John Cleese

93. “Ask yourself, “When does this decision have to be taken?” and having answered it, defer the decision until then, in order to give yourself maximum pondering time.”

— John Cleese

94. “You can’t make Christ funny. He’s self-aware, he’s too flexible within the situation. It’s rigidity, it’s when the ego takes over and the behavior becomes inappropriate that it becomes funny.”

— John Cleese

95. “Most of the bad taste I’ve been accused of has been generic bad taste; it’s been making fun of an idea as opposed to a person.”

— John Cleese

96. “Although I had good hand-eye coordination, I was so tall and skinny and muscularly weak that I just was not well coordinated. But what I started to do quite early on was watch some of the great old silent comedians, like Laurel and Hardy and Chaplin, and then later on Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton.”

— John Cleese

97. “I would say that I began with a very edgy, very driven personality and after a sufficient amount of therapy over many, many years, I managed to become rather relaxed and happy.”

— John Cleese

98. “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.”

— John Cleese

99. “I just think that sometimes we hang onto people or relationships long after they’ve ceased to be of any use to either of you. I’m always meeting new people, and my list of friends seems to change quite a bit.”

— John Cleese

100. “The neurologist and psychologist Maurice Nicoll told how he had once asked his headmaster about a passage in the Bible, and after he had listened to the answer for some time, he realized that the man had no idea what he was talking about. What I admire about Nicoll is that he made this discovery when he was only ten. It took me another forty-five years before the penny dropped: very, very few people have any idea what they are talking about.”

— John Cleese