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I want to write a book which is the history of comedy.

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
Comedy
History
Write
Book
Writing

More quotes by John Cleese

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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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Comedy always works best when it is mean-spirited.
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Laughter destroys any divisions between people.
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I have several times made a poor choice by avoiding a necessary confrontation.
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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.
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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.
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My mum died about three years ago at the age of 101, and just towards the end, as she began to run out of energy, she did actually stop trying to tell me what to do most of the time.
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years ago we would have been burned for this. Now what I am suggesting is that we've advanced.
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If you wish to kill yourself but lack the courage to, I think a visit to Palmerston North will do the trick.
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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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The Americans are just more enthusiastic and more likely to engage in hyperbole.
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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.
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I have a tendency sometimes to get too logical with what I'm writing, just because I want it to be kind of perfect.
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The British fans are liable to suddenly be talking to you about something that you don't know how you got into the conversation. I think it's something to do with the fact that they've been watching you for so many years sort of you telling your story.
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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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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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If God did not intend for us to eat animals, then why did he make them out of meat?
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The sad thing about true stupidity is that you can do absolutely nothing about it.
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Everything in comedy's got to be exactly right, which is why making a comedic film is kind of a difficult process, because, for most of the two years of shooting it and editing it and reshooting and all of that, it's not quite right. And it's only when you just at the end, you put the final polish on it, it becomes really funny again.
John Cleese
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We all die at the end, but does that nullify everything? Would most people rather say, I wish I hadn't been born? Once you're born you'll have to die, now is that funny or sad?
John Cleese