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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.

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
Americans
Failing
Positive
Success
Envious
Much
Fairly
Love
Britain
Bunch
Fail

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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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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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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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I think it takes a long time, as you get older, to realize just how crazy the world is, just how ridiculous it all is.
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I think that money spoils most things, once it becomes the primary motivating force.
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Either people walk round dressed as chickens or they listen to Beethoven.
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I was always a sports nut but I've lost interest now in whether one bunch of mercenaries in north London is going to beat another bunch of mercenaries from west London.
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Most of the bad taste I've been accused of has been generic bad taste it's been making fun of an idea as opposed to a person.
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Michael Palin decided to give up on his considerable comedy talents to make those dreadfully tedious travel shows. Have you ever tried to watch one?
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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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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 wish you wusses would stop whining about your unhappiness. I'm really fed up with it. Pour yourself a scotch and pull yourself together. Go out and shoot something!
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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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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.
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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.
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You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him enter regional distribution codes in data field 97 to facilitate regression analysis on the back end.
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Because, as we all know, it’s easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking. And it’s also easier to do little things we know we can do than to start on big things that we’re not so sure about.
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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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If you really don't know where to start or if you're stuck, start generating random connections and allow your intuition to tell you if one might lead somewhere interesting.
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When you do comedy in front of an audience, they are the ones who tell you whether it's funny or not and which bits are funny and which bits need to be fixed.
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