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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
Littles
Embodied
Little
Envious
Country
Distinguished
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Fairly
Presses
Press
England
Anyone
More quotes by John Cleese
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.
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There's nothing good on the television let's burn a witch. It must have been terribly exciting to live in those times.
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Basil Fawlty was an easy character for me. For some reason, portraying a mean, uptight, incompetent bully comes naturally to me.
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I learned a lot of things about literature talking to people at the publishing company. Did you know that about 90 percent of celebrity autobiographies are ghostwritten?
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The Americans all love 'The Holy Grail', and the English all love 'Life Of Brian', and I'm afraid on this one, I side with the English.
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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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Sense of humor is so much more subjective than anyone believes.
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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.
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Loving your neighbour as much as yourself is practically bloody impossible? You might as well have a commandment that states,'Thou shalt fly'.
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You have to create boundaries of space and then you have to create boundaries of time.
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The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.
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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.
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I think that money spoils most things, once it becomes the primary motivating force.
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My hovercraft is full of eels.
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Who's ever going to write a film in which I get the girl? Me!
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If you are leaping a ravine, the moment of takeoff is a bad time for considering alternative strategies... Do it in the 'closed' mode. But the moment the action is over, try to return to the 'open' mode... because in that mode we are the most aware, most receptive, most creative, and therefore at our most intelligent.
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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.
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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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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
The Americans are just more enthusiastic and more likely to engage in hyperbole.
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