Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
While you're being creative, nothing is wrong. There's no such thing as a mistake, and any drivel may lead to the breakthrough.
English television from the Fifties to the Nineties was the least bad in the world, and now it's just as bad as it is anywhere.
The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.
Basil Fawlty was an easy character for me. For some reason, portraying a mean, uptight, incompetent bully comes naturally to me.
For those wondering how to deal with anxiety and depression, the first thing to consider is what you're putting into your mouth.
I don't want to have to start being unselfish again. The great thing about being on your own is you do what you damned well like.
Once we've made a decision, we are efficient only if we go through with it decisively, undistracted by doubts about its correctness.
I love having different cultures around, but when the parent culture kind of dissipates, you're left thinking, 'Well, what's going on?'
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.
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.
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.
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.
The writing is the most important bit, and performing it is just closing the circle because I'm less likely to screw it up than anyone else.
Loving your neighbour as much as yourself is practically bloody impossible? You might as well have a commandment that states,'Thou shalt fly'.
When I was in school, I was beaten every 30 minutes. It never did me any harm except for some psychological mal-adjustments and blurred vision.
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?
I think the hard thing for young comedians is that the majority of the young people in the audience out there don't have the wide range of references.
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.
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.
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.
We need to be in the open mode when we are pondering a problem, but, once we come up with a solution, we must then switch to the closed mode to implement it.
The open mode is a mood in which curiosity for its own sake can operate, because we're not under pressure to get a specific thing done properly. We can play.
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.
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.
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.
Naturally, people's image is of a performer, but the reality of it is the writing for me has always been the most important thing and the most rewarding thing.
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.
Ask yourself, "When does this decision have to be taken?" and having answered it, defer the decision until then, in order to give yourself maximum pondering time.
Sci-fi has never really been my bag. But I do believe in a lot of weird things these days, such as synchronicity. Quantum physics suggests it's possible, so why not?
Aping urbanity, Oozing with vanity, Plump as a manatee, Faking humanity, Intellectual inanity, Journalistic calamity, Fox Noise insanity, You're a profanity, Hannity.
The very essence of playfulness is an openness to anything that may happen, the feeling that whatever happens, it's okay... you're either free to play, or you're not.
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!
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.
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?
You go in and meet the head of BBC One and get an assurance about not dumbing down. And then, of course a few months later, he's been replaced by someone you haven't met.
By watching the great, old comedians I picked up a few tricks about how to do physical comedy. And whenever I could learn something, I sort of added that to my repertoire.
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.
I think humor is incredibly positive, I think it is life advancing. There's medical research to show that it improves your antibodies. It's all about sense and perspective.
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.
I find the Alexander Technique very helpful in my work. Things happen without you trying. They get to be light and relaxed. You must get an Alexander teacher to show it to you.
I would say that I began with a very edgy, very driven personality and after a sufficient amount of therapy over many, many years, I managed to become rather relaxed and happy.
When you've been doing comedy for forty years, you really do know most of the jokes. And even if you don't know a specific joke, you can pretty much guess what it's going to be.
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?
That's a lovely experience when you make an audience laugh. Then the nerves go away for a bit. And sometimes you do things then that you've never done before that are really funny.
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.
All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
I'm not saying Obama is right on everything. Of course not. He may be wrong on a number of things. But what I do know is that he behaves like a very, very sane man almost all the time.
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.
When you get to my age, and I'm 66 now, you realize that the world is a madhouse and that most people are operating in fantasy anyway. So once you realise that, it doesn't bother you much.