I think that money spoils most things, once it becomes the primary motivating force.
Students who laugh more- learn more. Students who laugh more earn more.
A man will give up almost anything except his suffering.
When I was a child and I was upset about something, my mother was not capable of containing that emotion, of letting me be upset but reassuring me, of just being with me in a calming way. She always got in a flap, so I not only had my own baby panics, fears and terrors to deal with, but I had to cope with hers, too. Eventually I taught myself to remain calm when I was panicked, in order not to upset her. In a way, she had managed to put me in charge of her. At 18 months old, I was doing the parenting.
Who's ever going to write a film in which I get the girl? Me!
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.
There's nothing good on the television; let's burn a witch. It must have been terribly exciting to live in those times.
Aping urbanity, Oozing with vanity, Plump as a manatee, Faking humanity, Intellectual inanity, Journalistic calamity, Fox Noise insanity, You're a profanity, Hannity.
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 And then, of course a few months later, he's been replaced by someone you haven't met.
There are 3 basic differences between we British and you Americans. One, we speak English, and you don't. Two, when we have a "World Championship", we invite teams from other nations. Three, when you meet the British head of State, you only have to get down on one knee.
And now for something completely different...
Too many people confuse being serious with being solemn.
We don't know where we get our ideas from. What we do know is that we do not get them from our laptops.
I think it's because in America you always get the sense that if you fail, you can just pack up your things and go somewhere else and try again. But in England, it's so geographically small that if somebody succeeds here, it reduces your chances of succeeding.
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. But in order to do that, we have to slice away at our egos and try to get them down to a manageable size, and then still work some practiced light meditation. So real religion is about reducing our egos, whereas all the churches are interested in is egotistical activities, like getting as many members and raising as much money and becoming as important and high-profile and influential as possible.
While you're being creative, nothing is wrong. There's no such thing as a mistake, and any drivel may lead to the breakthrough.
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.
It's a plastic surgeon you need, not a doctor
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.
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.
If God did not intend for us to eat animals, then why did he make them out of meat?
Laughter destroys any divisions between people.
Life is a terminal disease, and it is sexually transmitted.
Writing is the great skill, the creative skill. The acting is more an interpretative skill. And the thrill for me is the moment when I think of something. And then the challenge is how to get that funny idea to work in terms of the structure and that kind of thing, which is - and that's what I really love doing.
Tension is wonderful for making people laugh.
Now most people do not want an ordinary life in which they do a job well, earn the respect of their collaborators and competitors, bring up a family and have friends. That's not enough any more, and I think that is absolutely tragic - and I'm not exaggerating - that people feel like a decent, ordinary, fun life is no longer enough.
In Britain, girls seem to be either bright or attractive. In America, that's not the case. They're both.
When people say 'I'm not a prude, but ...' what they mean is 'I am a prude, and ...'.
God was treated like this powerful, erratic, rather punitive father who has to be pacified and praised. You know, flattered.
...when you collaborate with someone else on something creative, you get to places that you would never get to on your own. The way an idea builds as it careens back and forth between good writers is so unpredictable. Sometimes it depends on people misunderstanding each other, and that's why I don't think there's any such thing as a mistake in the creative process. You never know where it might lead.
Loving your neighbour as much as yourself is practically bloody impossible? You might as well have a commandment that states,'Thou shalt fly'.
If you want to know who your friends are, have a major failure.
The Americans are just more enthusiastic and more likely to engage in hyperbole.
Bureaucrats shouldn't be in charge of comedy.
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 think we're all born with a sense of humor. Creativity is another thing though.
Some actors, I think, want to feel that they are as creative as the writer. And the answer is, frankly, they're not.
The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.
I have a tendency sometimes to get too logical with what I'm writing, just because I want it to be kind of perfect.
If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.
I would like to do my own eulogy, and then shoot myself and then get in the coffin.
The most creative people have this childlike facility to play.
No hope for planet at all. But I will be gone before the planet is gone, so it's your problem.
I can do anything I want, I'm eccentric!
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?
I used to desire many, many things, but now I have just one desire, and that's to get rid of all my other desires.
I have several times made a poor choice by avoiding a necessary confrontation.
The World is insane. With tiny spots of sanity, here and there... Not the other way around!
Give your mind as long as possible to come up with something original.
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.
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.
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.
If I can get you to laugh with me, you like me better, which makes you more open to my ideas. And if I can persuade you to laugh at the particular point I make, by laughing at it you acknowledge its truth.
I get bored easily. I've been bored most of my life.
If life were fair, Dan Quayle would be making a living asking 'Do you want fries with that?'
I don't understand why very, very rich people want to have even more money than they've already got.
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.
What is absurd is not the teachings of the founders of religion, it's what followers subsequently make of it.
Either people walk round dressed as chickens or they listen to Beethoven.
I love having different cultures around, but when the parent culture kind of dissipates, you're left thinking, 'Well, what's going on?'
I think that I feel an indignation when I don't understand something.
If you wish to kill yourself but lack the courage to, I think a visit to Palmerston North will do the trick.
Telling people how to be creative is easy - being creative is difficult.
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.
A wonderful thing about true laughter is that it just destroys any kind of system of dividing people.
I've always found life quite difficult to explain to people or to myself.
I can never do better than 'Fawlty Towers,' whatever I do. Now I very much want to teach young talent some rules of the game.
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.
To be creative you must create a space for yourself where you can be undisturbed... separate from everyday concerns.
Come to me. I want to plow you like a Calgary driveway at Christmas.
A satisfied customer. We should have him stuffed.
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.
It seems astounding to me now that the video games are perhaps as important as the movie themselves. And people will spend 2 or 3 years obsessing about the video game in exactly the same way that they'd be obsessing about the movie if they were working on that.
I think the problem with people like this is that they are so stupid that they have no idea how stupid they are.
A lot of humour is about just enjoying life and spontaneity and because you make a joke that puts somebody down - we're always teasing each other. It's with affection. It's nasty teasing that we - not all teasing; nasty teasing you cut out.
The thrill I got discovering Buster Keaton when I was growing up was so exciting. He was one of the greats.
I'm not sure what's going on in Britain. I don't know what's going on in London. Because London is no longer an English city, and that's how they got the Olympics. I mean, they said, "We're the most cosmopolitan city on Earth," but it doesn't feel English.
The sad thing about true stupidity is that you can do absolutely nothing about it.
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?
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.
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.
We all operate in two contrasting modes, which might be called open and closed. The open mode is more relaxed, more receptive, more exploratory, more democratic, more playful and more humorous. The closed mode is the tighter, more rigid, more hierarchical, more tunnel-visioned. Most people, unfortunately spend most of their time in the closed mode.
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.
Always start where the energy is.
Muslims, who have a completely different value system, come to the West, then they should accept that there are certain basic values in the West intrinsic to our culture. Just as I wouldn't suggest that any Westerner walk down the streets of Saudi Arabia in a bikini.
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.
Manuel will show you to your rooms - if you're lucky.
When you're being stalked by an angry mob with raspberries, the first thing to do is to release a tiger.
Oh, I could spend my life having this conversation - look - please try to understand before one of us dies
You don't have to be the Dalai Lama to tell people that life's about change.
Comedy always works best when it is mean-spirited.
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.
This is the most important joke I've ever heard. Niels Bohr, the founder of Quantum Physics, had a friend to dinner. As the friend left, he noticed a horseshoe nailed above Bohr's front door. He said to Bohr, accusingly, "Niels, you're a great scientist. You can't believe in superstitions." Bohr answered, "I don't, but apparently it works anyway."As with confirmation bias, we tend to lean toward superstitions that benefit us.
Basil Fawlty was an easy character for me. For some reason, portraying a mean, uptight, incompetent bully comes naturally to me.
The English contribution to world cuisine: the chip.
It’s only on the brink that people find the will to change. Only at the precipice do we evolve.
The most creative people have learned to tolerate the slight discomfort of indecision for much longer and so, just because they put in more pondering time, their solutions are more creative.
When we hold a World Championship for a particular sport, we invite teams from other countries to play as well.
Don't let anyone tell you what you ought to like.
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.
If you are leaping a ravine, the moment of takeoff is a bad time to be considering alternative strategies.
Nothing will stop you being creative more effectively as the fear of making a mistake.
My views are heretical to people who believe in political correctness.
It's not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand.
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.
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.
I find it rather easy to portray a businessman. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me.
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.
I was a terrible dancer. I dance like an Englishman.
The really good idea is always traceable back quite a long way, often to a not very good idea which sparked off another idea that was only slightly better, which somebody else misunderstood in such a way that they then said something which was really rather 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.
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?
Why write about the past? Well, there's more of it.
Creativity is not the possession of some special talent. It’s about the willingness to play.
But then acting is all about faking. We're all very good at faking things that we have no competence with.
The one thing I remember about Christmas was that my father used to take me out in a boat about ten miles offshore on Christmas Day, and I used to have to swim back. Extraordinary. It was a ritual. Mind you, that wasn't the hard part. The difficult bit was getting out of the sack.
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.
He who laughs most, learns best.
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.
Political correctness is a bit like a granny, a maiden aunt arriving at a party when everyone's having a good time. And she comes in, they all start sort of buttoning up and becoming self-conscious and behaving properly and then when she leaves, you can have fun again.
Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.
As Daniel Levitin writes, our brain is a "giant pattern detector." If we read something that coincides with what we already believe we're more likely to give it credence, while the opposite is not true.
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.
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.
Once we've made a decision, we are efficient only if we go through with it decisively, undistracted by doubts about its correctness.
