- John Cleese once told me he'd do anything for money. So I offered him a pound to shut up, and he took it.
- [on gay marriage] It's about time they suffered too.
- [on his favourite sexual position] Flat on my back with my wallet open.
- If the studios paid the artists, how would they ever be able to afford the executives?
- There was a time when we were almost universally hated by large sections of society. Now that we are the cuddly old farts of comedy, I rather miss the hatred.
- We couldn't get [Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979)] made then. We looked and looked for money and we couldn't find anyone to back it. Only George Harrison would back it - and that's because he mortgaged his house.
- Americans like to think Python is how English people really are. There is an element of truth to that.
- The odd thing is I knew that if [Spamalot] was going to be successful it would have to appeal to people who weren't just Python fans. What happened was that Middle America discovered Python through Spamalot.
- I've been trying to write musicals since I did The Mikado or the Town of Titipu (1987) with Jonathan Miller and the ENO in 1987. I'd do new gags each night. I thought, "I like this - we should find a subject". It took me about 20 years to find a subject.
- [asked why Terry Gilliam insisted on him shaving his head for The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988)] Pure sexual jealousy.
- When we got to North America it was extraordinary to find that everybody assumed that we were totally stoned all the time while making it up. You had to point out to people that actually you can't write comedy when you're stoned, you can't find the typewriter, but a lot of people still say to this day, 'Oh when I was a college kid, man, we'd just get a joint and watch Python and we'd laugh and laugh.' And you think, 'Well, actually you didn't need Python, you could just look at the wallpaper!'
- I was a war baby. My earliest memories are of a Wellington bomber crashing in flames into the field beside my nursery school. 'The pilot saw the kids and took the plane down,' said the nurses. I remember being forced into a Mickey Mouse gas mask, instilling a lifelong fear of rubber masks and the eponymous rodent.
- I think there's something very seductive about the glamour of dressing up and playing somebody else, and that comes from a sadness. I think I only became any good eventually through Python by being disguised and by being other people and it was only latterly in my life that I have been able to be funny as myself or be confident. I don't have to put on a disguise or wear a wig now but that's what I used to do.
- [talking about the orphanage/boarding school he grew up in] I still have nightmares that I'm back at the Ophney. It was a physically abusive, bullying, harsh environment for a kid to grow up in, a boarding school where nobody had any fathers. The terms were interminable, fourteen weeks with no emotional support.
- I used to bridle when people used to describe us all as 'public school' - it's not true. Graham was Leicester Grammar, Terry was grammar, I was this nightmare school and Michael was Shrewsbury, which is a public school, and John was at Clifton, also a public school. That's two out of six.
- [1975] A comedian must never be vulnerable. The great comedians are always apparently invulnerable on stage although off stage they were not such supermen.
- I'm just trying to earn enough to get my daughter through college and my wife through collagen.
- Comedians are not normal people. It is not a normal thing to do. You don't become a comedian without some early traumatizing experience, so comedy is also a coping mechanism.
- No gentleman talks to anyone before noon. One of the reasons I write alone is that I can't bear speaking to anyone first thing in the morning.
- [on Graham Chapman's funeral] The reaction was uproarious as he [John Cleese] became funnier and funnier, and in the end the spirit of Graham was released, and we all felt liberated. Yes of course everyone was sad and in tears, but we were laughing. After that, the hardest thing I ever had to do was sing 'Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.' For a moment trying to sing it was just terrible for me, because music makes you weep, while comedy makes you weep and laugh, but because of all the earlier laughter I got through it.
- [on his education] I did S Level. Nobody's ever done S Level, because it's above A Level and I once found somebody else who'd done it and we reckoned we were the only two people in England who ever did S Level!
- Being an ex-Python is weird. I suppose we are all mistaken for the people we once were, that's what the fossilization of fame is all about, but we're not really them, are we? Those young men are long since gone. We have to talk about them as though we still are them, but we're not, you know. They were smart, young, and terribly clever. We older, wider, and grayer men are their descendants. I used to be Eric Idle in Monty Python. But now I'm not. I'm not even like him. He drank and smoked and ate meat. He was married to a blond Australian. I'm none of the above.
- Of course I'm not ashamed to lose it in public anymore, but a blubbing comic just ain't entertaining.
- We [Brits] like to call it [soccer] "football" because, unlike American football, it is played with the feet.
- [on meeting George Harrison for the first time] He never shut up. Thank God.
- Secondary music is really bad for you. It's worse than smoking. At least smoking doesn't stop your thinking, but Muzak makes me resentful and gloomy.
- He [Bill Murray] has such a lived-in face, and how rare it is to see a decent wrinkle on the screen. Hollywood is into facial prejudice in a big way. Age denial is the national sport.
- There's a legendary story of one of the Monty Python boys being interviewed on a tape recorder by a pretty Canadian journalist while actually in flagrante, but wild horses would not drag the name of the recipient of this in-depth interview from my lips. To talk seriously on the radio about comedy while porking the questioner is still something of a high spot in the history of irony.
- [on the BBC in the 1960s] It was fabulous. It was the golden age of executives, there weren't any.
- [on his last correspondence with Robin Williams] Robin was supposed to come and do the last night, and all the time I was getting emails from him, and he was going downhill. Then he said he could come, but he didn't want to be onstage. I said, 'I totally get that.' Because he was suffering from severe depression. Through my friend Bobcat Goldthwait we were in touch, and in the end he said, 'I can't come, I'm sorry, but I love you very much.' We realized afterwards he was saying goodbye.
- The secret of a good marriage is separate rooms. I've been with my current wife for 33 years and I can tell you that it works. I don't mean not having sex - you can shag anywhere. I think Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own applies to all human beings at all stages.
- The dreadful thing about getting older is you cry at the drop of a hat. I used to make fun of Richard Attenborough for crying. Now I'm turning into him. I can't remember anybody's names, so I call everybody "darling" and I cry all the time.
- I can be very angry and acerbic. Therapy is really useful. It gives me a triangulation on myself: "I was this asshole the other day; why did I do that?"
- I like being a foreigner. For me to live in California is very pleasant - I'm more comfortable not feeling a part of everything, not feeling responsible for the government or the roads or the health system.
- At school we had a very soggy, muddy playing field and I wasn't very good at football, so on a Thursday afternoon, instead of changing for compulsory games, I'd put on my school cap, march out the front door, go down town to Wolverhampton and watch a movie. I did this regularly every Thursday afternoon, for ages and ages, marching boldly past the headmaster's study and nobody ever caught me, because if you've got your cap on and you're walking through the front door, you're clearly doing some school business, right? So, I learnt very early on that if you're brazen, nobody questions you. If I'd been sneaking out I would probably have been caught. Well I finally was caught in my penultimate year. The headmaster sent for me and he said, 'Did you enjoy the movie this afternoon?' And I annoyed him by saying, 'No, not very much sir, it wasn't very good.'
- [on a YouTube comment accusing Monty Python's film Life of Brian of blasphemy] It's odd, isn't it, that people still, after, what is it, 30 years?, still don't understand that Jesus Christ is in that movie twice in his own guise and they still insist on making it Brian. But when you're stupid, there's nothing that can be done. Well, this is exactly the sort of people we wish to upset. Thank you. Well done, job well done!
- I remember the stripper in Bradford [who ended up being given a non-speaking part as a topless newsagent in the Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch "The Dull Life of a City Stockbroker"]! Oh God, that was wild. I remember it very, very well. Ian MacNaughton insisted on filming this stripper in Bradford, and we said, 'But Ian we haven't written a stripper sketch.' 'Oh, I promised her a part, it's great, and she'll be great.' So we said, 'Oh right, we'll be undertakers.' We might have written the thing about the undertakers and we probably said, 'They're sitting there watching a stripper.' So we have to sit and watch this stripper and I find strip shows offensive. They're aggressive and women who do it are very aggressive, it's not at all sexy or erotic. She was a bit of a scrubber and she did this thing and I remember going, 'Oh, fucking hell.'
- I've lost friends because I was just being ironic. I'm trying to eschew irony, but it's very hard. It's embedded deep in my bones.
- People my age are terrified of the idea of downloading. They're scared.
- [At boarding school] I got used to dealing with groups of boys and getting on with life in unpleasant circumstances and being smart, funny and subversive at the expense of authority. Perfect training for Python. The senior school was very rough when I got there at the age of eleven. Beatings were common. The masters could beat you with canes. The older boys, the prefects, were allowed to whack you with slippers. There was a dormitory 100 yards long which they would patrol at night, and if they heard anybody talking and nobody owned up, everybody had to get out of bed and bend over the end of their beds. They'd go down the line and whack the whole dormitory. And it was fucking freezing. It was a very grim, Midlands orphanage. I was cold until I was nineteen.
- [on Los Angeles] A silly town where you don't have to take anything particularly seriously.
- [1974] Interviews are so boring. People you expect to be interesting just go winding on and on and the whole procedure's such a waste of time. The Ellsberg interview in Rolling Stone was a worthwhile read because it divulged all sorts of facts that wouldn't otherwise be available. But that's an exception.
- I was more well read than most teenagers because at boarding school there was nothing else to do in the evenings. I didn't have a fucking youth! In the evenings we did prep, then cleaned the school.
- During the tour, particularly in Birmingham, Graham (Chapman) was so fucking drunk it was just horrible. He'd get very obstreperous and he'd always pick on me, he'd always have a go at me, I don't know why. And I'm not given to bullying, I don't like it, and I'm pretty spiky with it because I'm used to dealing with it. You don't let them bully you, so I'd always give him sharp tongue back. He'd get very angry because he was supposed to make a very quick change as a Colonel and then he came on in the 'Ken Shabby' sketch. We used to go on before him and there'd be a silence and you'd realise that somebody was off, and it was Graham. So I'd go on for him and I think one night John (Cleese) and I both went on for him, we both appeared on opposite sides of the stage trying to fill in. We fell in behind each other and walked about together desperately trying to fill in. He was always furious if you filled in for him, saying, 'What are you fucking doing? I'm in the sketch!' On the tours he would always have either David (Sherlock) or somebody topping him up with alcohol between bits. There was one time when we were filming up in Glencoe for the TV series - I came up, I'd been drinking on the train and I went to bed. I wasn't called first thing in the morning and I was so grateful as I had a huge hangover. So I staggered up, it was lunchtime and I met them all coming back. I said, 'What did you shoot?' Nobody would speak. Graham had had to do this one speech and he hadn't got it all morning. It took twenty-six takes, and they were all like 'Oh, fuck'. He'd been very excessive the night before. I got off the train and I was drunk after drinking all the way up to Edinburgh, and he was thrilled to see me because I was more drunk than he was. It was one of those nights when he was crawling round the bar. So, sometimes it seemed to be fun and sometimes it was really quite serious.
- [on receiving abuse on Twitter] I tell them to fuck off. I find that works.
- [on Graham Chapman] I was not really that close to him, as a pal, because he never revealed very much of himself, there was a lot hidden. It's hard to be friendly with somebody who's hidden.
- My mother always had problems with communicating and I remember the first day she took me to [boarding] school she simply disappeared. She didn't say goodbye, she just took off, and later on she said: 'Well, I didn't want to cause a fuss. You were happily playing, so I thought I'd just slip away and avoid a scene.' I had no idea I was going to be left. I was just dumped. One or two abandonment issues there you can see ...
- [2009] It is an odd thing to do comedy and we were an odd bunch. And it was not undergraduate humour, we are all graduates thank you very much. Perhaps our best achievement was managing to stay together long enough to segue from TV comedy into movies. All in all we managed fourteen years and that while we turned from young men into husbands and fathers. And do we still get on? Yes. We do. So there. Of course we bicker and bitch and gossip and moan about each other, but you just try attacking one of the others and see what you get.
- Laughter is what I remember most [about being in Monty Python]. I don't think I ever laughed so much in my life. It was a writers' commune. For the first and last time in Showbiz history the Writers were in charge. All material had to be auditioned out loud. If we didn't laugh we sold it to other comedians. The Pythons wrote in pairs and Cleese would always read out Chapman/Cleese and Palin would always read out Jones/Palin. I was on my own. But it left me free to edit and assess. I have always thought of myself as the Python wicket keeper. Cleese, who always gave the impression of being somehow above the proceedings, would unleash devastating readings of his sketches destroying us, killing us, and occasionally we too would make him laugh, and his huge frame would lie full length on the floor roaring out loud and rolling around in merriment. The Doctor would chuckle. Gilliam would greet new material with a broad grin, Jonesy could go off into unexpected hysterics and Michael laughed freely and sometimes uncontrollably: once when Cleese nailed him with the Cheese Shop we thought some kind of medical intervention might be needed, and indeed a fresh bottle of Sancerre, prescribed by our own doctor, had to be applied before he calmed down. Graham of course, from St. Bart's hospital, was studying to be a fully qualified alcoholic. Typically, none of us noticed.
- Life at Cambridge was different beyond belief for me. At school every second of your day was organised, and you did this at this time, and you did that at that time. Suddenly you were in charge of your life, and you could stay up all night. You'd have a tutorial once a week. You'd have to turn in an essay once a week. The rest of the time was entirely up to you. That sense of freedom is unbelievable and really profound, and the good news is the privilege was not having to earn a living, the privilege was having that time to find out who you were or what you wanted to be in an environment of other people all of the same age. That's when I first met public school people, who were completely different from my kind. We were lower middle-class oiks. We could barely scrape through. Grammar schools are what we dreamed of trying to get to if we could escape from the orphanage. I found a guy in LA recently who was there at the same time as me, and I said, 'How bad was it?' and he said, 'It was fucking grim, a nightmare.' But my mum had to work, that's what she had to do. There was no money, we were broke. It wasn't a picnic and it certainly wasn't a public school.
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