Top 180 John Cleese Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “The writing is the most important bit, and performing it is just closing the circle because I’m less likely to screw it up than anyone else.”

— John Cleese

102. “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.”

— John Cleese

103. “I’ve always found life quite difficult to explain to people or to myself.”

— John Cleese

104. “I was a terrible dancer. I dance like an Englishman.”

— John Cleese

105. “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

106. “Comedy always works best when it is mean-spirited.”

— John Cleese

107. “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?”

— John Cleese

108. “When people quote sketches to me, half the time I don’t know what they’re talking about so I have to sort of go, aha, yes, oh yep, I remember that and lie my way out of it.”

— John Cleese

109. “I don’t miss London much. I find it crowded, vast and difficult to get around. Cabs are incredibly expensive.”

— John Cleese

110. “Laughter destroys any divisions between people.”

— John Cleese

111. “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. Even if it’s done mainly for show, it’s still a start.”

— John Cleese

112. “I think humor is incredibly positive, I think it is life advancing. There’s medical research to show that it improves your antibodies. It’s all about sense and perspective.”

— John Cleese

113. “Once we’ve made a decision, we are efficient only if we go through with it decisively, undistracted by doubts about its correctness.”

— John Cleese

114. “I could take an umbrella and balance it on my chin or on my foot. And I just got interested in that kind of thing. And as I played games more and more and got stronger physically, I just became more coordinated.”

— John Cleese

115. “So, creatively, I was doubly blessed: constant relocation and parental disharmony. Add to these two gifts the well-established fact that many of the world’s greatest geniuses, both artistic and scientific, have been the product of serious maternal deprivation, and I am forced to the conclusion that if only my mother had been just a little more emotionally inadequate, I could have been HUGE.”

— John Cleese

116. “It seems astounding to me now that the video games are perhaps as important as the movie themselves. And people will spend 2 or 3 years obsessing about the video game in exactly the same way that they’d be obsessing about the movie if they were working on that.”

— John Cleese

117. “Filming is like a long air journey: there’s so much hanging around and boredom that they keep giving you food.”

— John Cleese

118. “That’s a lovely experience when you make an audience laugh. Then the nerves go away for a bit. And sometimes you do things then that you’ve never done before that are really funny.”

— John Cleese

119. “Don’t let anyone tell you what you ought to like...”

— John Cleese

120. “You don’t have to be the Dalai Lama to tell people that life’s about change.”

— John Cleese

121. “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.”

— John Cleese

122. “Always start where the energy is.”

— John Cleese

123. “The French have so many civil wars, they can win one now and again.”

— John Cleese

124. “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 there and you’re not quite sure what you’re supposed to be doing.”

— John Cleese

125. “Only an obsessional procrastinator would cry, ‘Let’s run for our lives, but not till Wednesday afternoon.’ Back.”

— John Cleese

126. “I think there are so many activities going on, like mountaineering. You know, you would pay good money not to have to do that, and yet there are people racing out who want to spend their spare time clambering up rocks.”

— John Cleese

127. “I tend to have an odd split in my mind: I tend to look at it as a writer and when the writing thing is OK and I’m happy with it, then I put on my actor’s hat.”

— John Cleese

128. “God was treated like this powerful, erratic, rather punitive father who has to be pacified and praised. You know, flattered.”

— John Cleese

129. “The anthropologist Gregory Bateson once said, “You can’t have a new idea ’til you’ve got rid of an old one.”

— John Cleese

130. “There’s something about watching an animal that puts you in contact with where we came from and what we’re still a part of.”

— John Cleese

131. “Either people walk round dressed as chickens or they listen to Beethoven.”

— John Cleese

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

— John Cleese

133. “I think the hard thing for young comedians is that the majority of the young people in the audience out there don’t have the wide range of references.”

— John Cleese

134. “If life were fair, Dan Quayle would be making a living asking ‘Do you want fries with that?’”

— John Cleese

135. “I realised that I really disliked him, and I knew exactly why: he didn’t know the difference between being solemn and being serious.”

— John Cleese

136. “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.”

— John Cleese

137. “The thrill I got discovering Buster Keaton when I was growing up was so exciting. He was one of the greats.”

— John Cleese

138. “By watching the great, old comedians I picked up a few tricks about how to do physical comedy. And whenever I could learn something, I sort of added that to my repertoire.”

— John Cleese

139. “Yes it’s her husband. She hasn’t got over it. Died thirty years ago.”

— John Cleese

140. “His persona seemed very odd to me: it was as though he’d once seen an intellectual, and had spent the rest of his life impersonating him.”

— John Cleese

141. “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?”

— John Cleese

142. “You go in and meet the head of BBC One and get an assurance about not dumbing down. And then, of course a few months later, he’s been replaced by someone you haven’t met.”

— John Cleese

143. “You have to create boundaries of space and then you have to create boundaries of time.”

— John Cleese

144. “What I’ve always wanted to do is be as funny as possible.”

— John Cleese

145. “Yes, I know it’s easy to make fun of the organised churches, but has it occurred to anyone to wonder why it’s so easy?”

— John Cleese

146. “Wine is wonderful stuff. But so many people are put off by the snobbery of it.”

— John Cleese

147. “Mother told me once that some Westonians privately criticised Dad for retreating so soon. They apparently felt it would have been more dignified to have waited a week or so before running away. I think this view misses the essential point of running away, which is to do it the moment the idea has occurred to you. Only an obsessional procrastinator would cry, “Let’s run for our lives, but not till Wednesday afternoon.”

— John Cleese

148. “It was not fair and therefore unworthy of my respect. It was as simple as that.”

— John Cleese

149. “Give your mind as long as possible to come up with something original.”

— John Cleese

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

— John Cleese