- We don't deliberately set out to offend. Unless we feel it's justified. And in the case of certain well-known religions, it was justified.
- I hope I will have achieved something lasting.
- John Howard Davies was not a very human person ... if you made a mistake of any kind, any sort of pause in speech, he would treat you rather as if he was a schoolmaster.
- [Chapman and the other members of the Monty Python group traveled to visit the site of Dachau concentration camp in Germany, but were told by staff that they were too late and the museum was about to close] Tell them we're Jewish.
- [1974; on whether his Monty Python work serves to get something out of his system that needs to be gotten out] Certainly in terms of writing. You get the argument from a lot of people that you're supposed to write to make people laugh. That's true. But also everything you do is written from something in your own experience. Nothing is written from outside the universe. You can't do a good situation comedy about stones. It's got to be animate. It has to be about human beings. Writing is therapeutic for me because - as you say - it gets something out of my system, some frustration, some anger. You almost have to be angry to write, I think. If you're angry about something, then you can always put something down on paper. If you're not, if you're just totally happy - and I don't actually know anyone in the whole bleeding world that is - you wouldn't be able to write a single thing. But if you're angry about something, it's possible to be witty, possible to be interesting, possible to write.
- [1974] I've always been a pacifist myself, and I've found that it's a very good thing because when someone attacks you physically - and it's happened to me quite a few times - if you behave passively and just say, 'Oh, go on and do it,' they can't do anything. They're just unable to commit actual physical violence against you. It happened to me, for example, in a pub. I was being a bit show-offy I suppose, talking to a strange guy's girl friend, and he got a bit uppity about it, and he started bashing my head on the wall. But I offered no resistance and he couldn't carry on with the act of violence. It's best just to succumb and lie on your back like little dogs do. If a big dog comes around and gets aggressive, the little one just lies down on its back and puts its paws up in the air and everything's all right: the big one won't bite him.
- [1974] I'm aggressively humble. On location for this Holy Grail film when we were in Scotland I went into a pub where there was a crowd of the regulars of that place: young people, old people, quite a mixture. And I thought they were all a bit uptight, because they were all out with their wives and girl friends having nice drinks. And I'm afraid there's a trait in me that's rather aggressive in that I try to split that up and make them think again, because I know how basically unhappy most of them are. So I decided to kiss the entire pub. I went round, man and woman, boy and girl, trying to kiss the lot, and succeeded mostly, except that one particular person was very annoyed and I got thrown out. The next day I decided that the only thing to do was to go back to the same place and not be frightened. So I went back. Met the same bloke. Immediately when I walked in the door he said, 'Oh, I suppose you're going to kiss everybody again tonight, are you?' That got a bit of a laugh from his friends. I took no notice, went up to the bar, bought myself a drink, and then went and sat down right next to him and said, 'I think you're rather boring, and you're probably the kind of person that only talks about cars and the number of girl friends you've had.' And the girl who was sitting next to him suddenly said, 'You're right. He does. That's all he does.' And other people started joining in. 'That's all he talks about. Nothing but that.' He went bright red. It was a lovely moment. But it doesn't always work out. Sometimes you get your head bashed in.
- [1974] [Psychiatry is] an awful job. A lot of people in medicine are conservative because they come from conservative backgrounds. They're usually sons and daughters of doctors. That's one of the things that has held psychiatry up for so long. People who are doing it are incapable of looking into other people's minds because they don't know what normal people are like - not normal - average, one could say - all these words are horrible. But psychiatry students are theorising about their own thoughts. The way they're made at the moment has very little to do with real people. It has to do with getting a medical degree and then deciding to specialise in psychiatry. But during that time the student has met no average people. He's been in a medical school - an ivory tower. Psychiatrists, as we loosely call them, should be living in the society they are trying to help. It's a bloody difficult job.
- I left Cambridge with a BA in Natural Sciences (lower second class), several bottles of the college sherry and a Ph.D. in Claret.
- When the time came at school to think about the future - I was thinking of medicine merely because my brother was at medical school - I saw a piece of the Cambridge Footlights Revue televised, so I thought 'I'd like to go to Cambridge!' I hadn't realised that had entered my thinking - it had subconsciously - so I found out how to get to Cambridge ... so that's where I went to do my medicine rather than straight to a London hospital.
- I, at the age of seven or eight, used to be an avid listener to a radio programme called The Goon Show, and at that age I wanted to be a Goon, but that didn't seem to be a very creditable career, certainly to my parents, I didn't even dare mention it. But then later on, around about the age of fourteen, I saw an excerpt on television of a revue produced by the Cambridge Footlights and that had in it a gentleman called Jonathan Miller and I thought, 'That's very good. That's the university I'll go to to read medicine.' [The Footlights] explained that if one wanted to join, one had to be invited to audition. That seemed rather unattainable, so I joined the Mummers instead.
- My parents, Tim and Beryl, sorry, Tim and Betty, were outraged when I arrived because they'd been expecting a heterosexual, black Jew with several rather amusing birth deformities as they needed the problems. They lived in an enormous Gothic castle in the South of France called Dundrinkingginandslimlinetonicwithicebutnolemonin, which was originally built by Marco Polo for himself and a few friends he wanted to invite round to his place after the pub closed.
- Cambridge. A university town built in a featureless flat landscape - so featureless and flat you wonder why anyone chose it as a location for anything. 'The magnificence of St John's, the noteworthy splendour of Trinity, the sheer pauntliness of "The Backs" ... and gazing at the magnificent, noteworthy, sheer splendour of the pauntley King's College Chapel, it would be a world weary traveller indeed who did not pause to think "Why the fuck didn't they build the whole town two inches to the right?"'
- I remember thinking, "Why does Terry Jones laugh so much?" They couldn't read out their material without laughing all the time. We weren't like that. What was interesting was that out of the twenty or so writers on The Frost Report the most prolific ones came together - Michael [Palin] and Terry [Jones] used to be very good at writing the bits of film that were used, Eric Idle was excellent at oneliners, and John [Cleese] and I used to go for a more verbal style of comedy - we realised that we all had something different to offer, and Barry Took brought us together with the idea of doing a series. Terry Gilliam I didn't know, but John did, and I think that he was responsible for bringing him into the group.
- Whatever the failings of the Footlights it was in fact more important than Cambridge University. Invisible to the outside world, but painfully obvious when you went for your first fitting, the University wore rose-coloured contact lenses. All it could offer was three years of dull and pointless work, with no hope of a job at the end of it, while Footlights had a much more practical and enjoyable syllabus, ending with a very good chance of achieving what every human being really wants: fame.
- I still hadn't been invited to join Footlights, the only purpose of my university career.
- We always used to rib Terry Gilliam somewhat because of his paucity of English language. John Cleese used to say his language use was limited, so things were either 'Great' or they 'really pissed him off '. Not many shades of meaning in between there. I do remember on one occasion we were touring Canada and we were flying over Lake Superior and Terry looked down at Lake Superior and turned round to the rest of us and said 'Hey you guys - a whole bunch of water' which I didn't feel adequately summed up the lake. He had noticed John Cleese when both John and I were in a revue in New York called Cambridge Circus and he was working for some cartoon magazine at the time and he wanted the archetypal English city gent - pin-striped trousers, bowler hat, rolled umbrella kind of person - to have in a photo-montage cartoon of a city gent who has an affair with a Barbie doll. So there are some rather nice pictures in existence of John Cleese doing naughty things with a Barbie doll.
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