Screenwriters From England

"I began my talk by saying that I had not written my plays for purposes of discussion. At once, I felt a ripple of panic run through the hall. I suddenly realised why. To everyone present, discussion was the whole point of drama. That was why the faculty had been endowed — that was why all those buildings had been put up! I had undermined the entire reason for their existence."

"I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself."

"Most of the propositions I’m interested in have been kidnapped and dressed up by academic philosophy, but they are in fact the kind of proposition which would occur to any intelligent person in his bath. They're not "academic" questions — they're simply questions which have been given academic status … Philosophy can be reduced to a small number of questions which can be battered about most bars most nights."

"It seems pointless to be quoted if one isn't going to be quotable … it's better to be quotable than honest."

"Chater: You insulted my wife in the gazebo yesterday evening! Septimus: You are mistaken. I made love to your wife in the gazebo. She asked me to meet her there, I have her note somewhere, I dare say I could find it for you, and if someone is putting it about that I did not turn up, by God, sir, it is a slander."

"I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead."

"This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It's for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you've done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly. What we're trying to do is to write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might...travel."

"Buddy Holly was twenty-two. Think of what he might have gone on to achieve. I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course."

"Public postures have the configuration of private derangement."

"I'm showing an interest in your work. I thought you liked me showing an interest in your work. My showing. Save the gerund and screw the whale."

"The days of the digitals are numbered. The metaphor is built into them like a self-destruct mechanism."

"Basil Fawlty was an easy character for me. For some reason, portraying a mean, uptight, incompetent bully comes naturally to me."

"If I like chocolate it won't surprise you that I have a few chocolates in my fridge, but if you find out I've got 16 warehouses full of chocolate, you'd think I was insane. All these rich guys are insane, obsessive compulsive twits obsessed with money — money is all they think about — they're all nuts."

"Four hundred years ago, we would have been burnt for this film. Now, I'm suggesting that we've made an advance."

"My biggest regret? Not being knighted by the Queen. I should have been a knight, and I would have been knighted, if I hadn't written one horrible horrible Python sketch which I deeply deeply regret — [cue Python sketch: "Upper Class Twit of the Year"]"

"You see, you could never do a sketch like that these days. The audience is too uninformed. I blame the Americans. Nation of obese, violent, pig-ignorant, bible-thumping morons contaminating world culture. That’s why I spend most of my time here in France. … Beautiful, isn’t it? Just look at those olive trees. [Interviewer: This is Santa Barbara.]"

"If God did not intend for us to eat animals, then why did he make them out of meat?"

"Technology frightens me to death. It's designed by engineers to impress other engineers, and they always come with instruction booklets that are written by engineers for other engineers — which is why almost no technology ever works."

"If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play."

"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."

"He who laughs most, learns best."

"No puns, no puns, no puns."

"If I had not gone into Monty Python, I probably would have stuck to my original plan to graduate and become a chartered accountant, perhaps a barrister lawyer, and gotten a nice house in the suburbs, with a nice wife and kids, and gotten a country club membership, and then I would have killed myself."

"Cleese, who enjoyed a fairly traditional, upper-middle-class upbringing, has dedicated his career to subverting the very same traditional British society which both molded him and projected him into the limelight. He has been enormously popular, in part because the British middle and upper class tend to enjoy that small moral relief which they experience through laughing at themselves. Christianity, nationalism and class have all come under Cleese’s satirical gaze while he continued to enjoy the fruits of the middle-class existence that he so tenaciously and profitably chipped away at. Now, like so many Boomers, he finds himself in the crumbling ruins of that same soppy-stern society, wishing that it would return, if only partially, and has begun a late-life declaration of war against political correctness, multiculturalism and the ‘loony left’ for which he is partly responsible."

"...what happens as you get older, and I promise you I'm not exaggerating, is that you begin to realize, first of all, that almost nobody knows what they're doing or what they’re talking about."

"I had a very strange experience in our stage tour. I'm sure that they all remember it differently, but I remember we started off in Brighton and worked our way front to the Midlands, and we were doing a show in Bristol, and we were doing a matinee there, and for some extraordinary reason the audience just didn't laugh. So after about four sketches of this Bristol matinee audience not laughing at something that people had been falling around at for two weeks, I realized that they were right and that it wasn't funny. And I'm being perfectly serious: if people aren't laughing, it isn't funny. And then the next house came in in the evening, and they started to laugh again in all the right places, and the show became funny again. But I mean comedy is incredibly brittle, and if something goes wrong with the atmosphere, you're dead."

"You can do the creation and then criticize it, but you can't do them at the same time. So if you're worried about offending people and constantly thinking of that, you are not going to be very creative. So I think it has a disastrous effect."

"But I think it's particularly worrying at the moment because you can only create in an atmosphere of freedom, where you're not checking everything you say critically before you move on. What you have to be able to do is to build without knowing where you're going because you've never been there before. That's what creativity is—you have to be allowed to build. And a lot of comedians now are sitting there and when they think of something, they say something like, 'Can I get away with it? I don't think so. So and so got into trouble, and he said that, oh, she said that.' You see what I mean? And that's the death of creativity. So I would say at the moment, this is a difficult time, particularly for young comedians, but you see, my audience is much older, and they're simply not interested in most of the woke attitudes. I mean, they just think that you should try and be kind to people and that's no need to complicate it, you know?"

"There's always been limitations on what they're allowed to say. Why you go to Molière and Louis XIV. I mean Molière had to be a bit careful. And there will always be limitations. I mean in England, until some ridiculous late date like 1965, all plays had to be submitted to what used to be a part of the palace called the Lord Chamberlain, and he would read it and there were hilarious letters used to go back was saying 'you may only say f--- once,' this sort of- ‘and you cannot say bugger. But you can say-' this sort of ridiculous negotiating letters."

"I want reparations from Italy,… and then the Normans came over in 1066 … they were horrible people from France, and they came and colonized us for 30 years — we need reparations there too, I’m afraid."

"[People] get competitive about this business of being oppressed,… We were oppressed, the English, by the Romans for 400 [years], from about 0 to 400."

"History is a history of crime. It’s a history of people who were stronger beating up people who were weaker, and it’s always been that. It’s deeply, deeply distasteful. But to pretend that one lot were worse than another — you do know the British have been slaves twice, right?"

"All humans are stupid, but the smarter ones at least have a handle on their own ignorance."

"When I was teaching, the headmaster told me "You know, the sad thing about true stupidity is that you can do absolutely nothing about it.""

"Aping Urbanity, Oozing with Vanity Plump as a Manatee, Faking Humanity Journalistic Calamity, Intellectual Inanity Fox News Insanity, You're a profanity Hannity"

"A wonderful thing about true laughter is that it just destroys any kind of system of dividing people."

"Because these people are operating at a very very low level of mental health, they are incapable of understanding the teaching."

"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."

"Nuns with banners!"

"I've got a false lip."

"It's not a model if it's full-size. It's a ice-breaker!"

"Tomkinson: What are these? Mother: Shoe trees, dear..."

"Contrary to what the politicians and religious leaders would like us to believe, the world won't be made safer by creating barriers between people. Cries of “They’re evil, let’s get ‘em” or “The infidels must die” sound frightening, but they're desperately empty of argument and understanding. They're the rallying cries of prejudice, the call to arms of those who find it easier to hate than admit they might be not be right about everything. Armageddon is not around the corner. This is only what the people of violence want us to believe. The complexity and diversity of the world is the hope for the future."

"One of the difficult things of so much travelling is to say goodbye."

"The use of the word "just" by an Australian means that whatever it is you have to do, it will not be easy, as in "Just pull that sword out of the stone" or "Just split that atom.""

"I wish them a long and happy life. If it's as long as their wedding, I'm sure they'll be fine."

"There are many ways of seeing the world. You can hang upside down from a meteor, volunteer to be the fourth stage of a three-stage rocket, or simply get in a balloon and keep going. But if it's sheer, unadulterated discomfort you're looking for, just stay on land."