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England is a fairly envious little country and it's embodied in the press. They don't like anyone being more distinguished than they are.

John Cleese

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John Cleese
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: October 27
Actor
Autobiographer
Comedian
Film Actor
Film Director
Film Producer
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Television Actor
Voice Actor
Writer
Weston-super-Mare
Somerset
John Marwood Cleese
Presses
Press
England
Anyone
Littles
Embodied
Little
Envious
Country
Distinguished
Like
Fairly

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The Americans are so much more positive. They are much more in love with success. In Britain, they're a fairly envious bunch, and they love it if you fail.
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Now most people do not want an ordinary life in which they do a job well, earn the respect of their collaborators and competitors, bring up a family and have friends. That's not enough any more, and I think that is absolutely tragic - and I'm not exaggerating - that people feel like a decent, ordinary, fun life is no longer enough.
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God was treated like this powerful, erratic, rather punitive father who has to be pacified and praised. You know, flattered.
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Filming takes a lot out of you. It really does. It's immensely demanding, and you have to put the rest of your life in the icebox until you do your final shot.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Students who laugh more- learn more. Students who laugh more earn more.
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I'm always meeting new people, and my list of friends seems to change quite a bit.
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I think the problem with people like this is that they are so stupid that they have no idea how stupid they are.
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Telling people how to be creative is easy - being creative is difficult.
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I think that the real religion is about the understanding that if we can only still our egos for a few seconds, we might have a chance of experiencing something that is divine in nature.
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Some actors, I think, want to feel that they are as creative as the writer. And the answer is, frankly, they're not.
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Sense of humor is so much more subjective than anyone believes.
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I think that money spoils most things, once it becomes the primary motivating force.
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I think we're all born with a sense of humor. Creativity is another thing though.
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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.
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Comedy always works best when it is mean-spirited.
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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.
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I think you can write very good comedy without a partner, but what I love about it, working with a partner, is that you get to places you'd never get on your own. It's like when God was designing the world and decided we couldn't have children without a partner it was a way of mixing up the genes so you'd get a more interesting product.
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