600 years ago we would have been burned for this (Life of Brian). Now what I am suggesting is that we've advanced.
A man will give up almost anything except his suffering.
But then acting is all about faking. We're all very good at faking things that we have no competence with.
Comedy always works best when it is mean-spirited.
Don't let anyone tell you what you ought to like... Some wines that some experts think are absolutely exquisite don't appeal to me at all.
For example, I've just seen some of the footage for Shrek 2, which will be coming out in May. And the character that I'm playing there, the king, doesn't look the slightest bit like me. Whereas a lot of the Shrek characters do look ever so slightly like the actors or actresses who are voicing them.
For me, the great problem growing up in England was that I had a very narrow concept of what God can be, and it was damn close to an old man with a beard.
God was treated like this powerful, erratic, rather punitive father who has to be pacified and praised. You know, flattered.
He who laughs most, learns best.
I can never do better than Fawlty Towers whatever I do. Now I very much want to teach young talent some rules of the game.
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.
I did read a lot of the Bond novels when I was in my 20s and they're very good. I mean they're very good bits of writing.
I find it rather easy to portray a businessman. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me.
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.
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.
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.
I want to write a book which is the history of comedy.
I was very sad to hear of the death of Ronnie Barker, who was such a warm, friendly and encouraging presence to have when I started in television. He was also a great comic actor to learn from.
I'm too tired to write new comedy.
If God did not intend for us to eat animals, then why did he make them out of meat?
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.
If life were fair, Dan Quayle would be making a living asking 'Do you want fries with that?'
If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.
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.
Oh, I could spend the rest of my life having this conversation - look - please try to understand before one of us dies.
The English contribution to world cuisine - the chip.
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.
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.
The thrill I got discovering Buster Keaton when I was growing up was so exciting. He was one of the greats.
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.
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.
When you get to the age of 64 and you can't do one or two of the things that Bond does, it will be a nice little fantasy for me.
Who's ever going to write a film in which I get the girl? Me!
Wine is wonderful stuff. But so many people are put off by the snobbery of it.
You don't have to be the Dalai Lama to tell people that life's about change.
John was in the movie Shrek 2, playing King Harold.
Former supporter of the Liberal Democrat political party.
Has played the father of two of the Charlie's Angels. First he played Lucy Liu's father in Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (2003). The next year he played Cameron Diaz's father in Shrek 2 (2004).
In 2002, he appeared in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), with Maggie Smith, and in Die Another Day (2002), opposite her son, Toby Stephens.
He allegedly refused the British Honour of the C.B.E. (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 1996.
When the Globe Theatre was rebuilt in London, a service was offered whereby you could have your name on a tile in the courtyard, for a donation to the project. Cleese and fellow python Michael Palin both signed up for tiles, but Palin's was spelled wrong. Cleese paid extra to ensure it would be spelled "Pallin."
The inspiration for "Fawlty Towers" (1975) came from a hotel stay he had with the other Pythons in the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay, England. The hotel manager was called Donald Sinclair, someone Cleese considered to be the rudest man he had ever encountered. He later played a character by the name of Donald P. Sinclair in Rat Race (2001).
According to Brian Henson, when Cleese guest-starred on "The Muppet Show" (1976), he enjoyed the show very much and became very close with the writers because he wanted to get involved in the writing. When he did get involved with the writing, he and the other writers came up with a concept where Cleese was being held against his will on the show and would try to get off the show while the Muppets were trying to get him to do his scheduled bits. Of course, in this case, life did not imitate art, as a few years later, Cleese appeared again with the Muppets in the film The Great Muppet Caper (1981).
Father of Cynthia Cleese.
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