I only ever threw a chair at John [Cleese] once... I think.

[on Robin Williams] Above all, what I remember about Robin was his humility. He could be funny as no one else could be funny - like he had another monumental voice telling him to be funny - let it rip! He could have had a huge ego. But he didn't.

Ludicrous concepts...like the whole idea of a 'war on terrorism.' You can wage war against another country, or on a national group within your own country, but you can't wage war on an abstract noun. How do you know when you've won? When you've got it removed from the Oxford English Dictionary?

Why do I feel so exercised about what we think of the people of the Middle Ages? I guess it's because so many of their voices are ringing vibrantly in my ears - Chaucer's, Boccaccio's, Henry Knighton's, Thomas Walsingham's, Froissart's, Jean Creton's... writers and contemporary historians of the period who seem to me just as individual, just as alive as we are today. We need to get to know these folk better in order to know who we are ourselves.

Saying 'We will destroy terrorism' is about as meaningful as saying 'We shall annihilate mockery.'

[on the first episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969)] We had an audience of old-age pensioners who thought they were coming in to see a circus. Graham and I were doing the first sketch - the flying sheep sketch - and there was not a lot of reaction to it. Just bewildered pensioners. We were also terrified that nobody would laugh when we did Holy Grail. We showed it to an audience of investors. They laughed for the first five minutes, then absolute silence for the whole rest of the film. It was one of the worst nights.

[on Graham Chapman] I think Graham was a bit of a mystery to anyone who knew and worked with him. I don't think we ever felt like we knew him. We knew he was capable of flashes of genius, but he was an enigma. So much of Graham was a pose. He was always acting and always going for the laughs.

One of the things we tried to do with the show was to try and do something that was so unpredictable that it had no shape and you could never say what the kind of humor was. And I think that the fact that "Pythonesque" is now a word in the Oxford English Dictionary shows the extent to which we failed.

(On being recognised as a "famous face"): "In a way it makes the world smaller, it makes it like a village. It's really how I felt the world always ought to be, where you feel you know people and people are interested in you. So, it's like a retreat into childhood really, where when you're a baby everybody's interested in you and it's rather the same thing."

Comedy is a dangerous business. If people find something funny you're okay. But the moment you do something that's meant to be funny and someone doesn't find it funny, they become angry. It's almost as if they resent the fact that you tried to make them laugh and failed. Nobody comes out of a mediocre performance of Hamlet seething with rage because it didn't make them cry. But just listen to people coming out of a comedy that didn't make them laugh.

The problem with the media is [news organizations] are primarily owned by corporations, and corporations are pro-establishment... Newspapers and television start using the vocabulary of politicians, and that's the way bias creeps in.

[on the death of Graham Chapman, who died on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the "Monty Python" comedy troupe]: I thought it was in terribly bad taste for him to die when he did. The worst case of party-pooping I've ever seen.