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.
Although I had good hand-eye coordination, I was so tall and skinny and muscularly weak that I just was not well coordinated. But what I started to do quite early on was watch some of the great old silent comedians, like Laurel and Hardy and Chaplin, and then later on Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton.
He who laughs most, learns best.
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.
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 could take an umbrella and balance it on my chin or on my foot. And I just got interested in that kind of thing. And as I played games more and more and got stronger physically, I just became more coordinated.
The English contribution to world cuisine – the chip.
A wonderful thing about true laughter is that it just destroys any kind of system of dividing people.
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.
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.
Oh, I could spend my life having this conversation – look – please try to understand before one of us dies.
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’ve always found life quite difficult to explain to people or to myself.
I just think that sometimes we hang onto people or relationships long after they’ve ceased to be of any use to either of you. I’m always meeting new people, and my list of friends seems to change quite a bit.
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.
You don’t have to be the Dalai Lama to tell people that life’s about change.
If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.
A man will give up almost anything except his suffering.
When we hold a World Championship for a particular sport, we invite teams from other countries to play as well.
Other people, you know, put a latex rubber on, you know, to become sexually excited. There’s so much I don’t understand.