And it was this location that provides my second memory. (It must come after the first because in it I am now standing up.) I was bitten by a rabbit.… - John Cleese

Peter Sellers offered me a small part opposite him in a rather good scene where Sir Guy Grand purchases a ‘School of Rembrandt’ portrait and then cuts out the nose of it with a knife, explaining to my character (a snotty young art dealer) that he only collects noses. I, of course, have to react with horror, and I exclaim ‘Shit!’ This was quite a naughty word in 1968 – so naughty, in fact, that when, some months later, my scene was shown on television to promote the movie I became, as far as I know, the first person ever to say ‘shit’ on British television. (This, incidentally, is one of my three claims to fame: the others are that I have a species of lemur named after me, and that I was once French-kissed – on camera – by Tim Curry.)

The French have so many civil wars, they can win one now and again.

So I explained to Connie that she needed to send a green light by, for example, talking about her father in a relaxed manner for a few seconds; then, I said, the queries about him would start flooding in. But what struck me as so odd was that I had been acting on this understanding all my life without ever having brought it to consciousness. As the French (and the Paraguayans) say, “A fish does not know the water that it swims in.” And eighteen years later, when I was writing A Fish Called Wanda, I used this realisation, when Archie is trying to explain to Wanda the social straitjacket from which he is desperate to escape: Wanda, do you have any idea what it’s like being English? Being so correct all the time, being so stifled by this dread of, of doing the wrong thing, of saying to someone, “Are you married?” and hearing, “My wife left me this morning,” or saying, “Do you have children?” and being told they all burned to death on Wednesday. You see, Wanda, we’re all terrified of embarrassment. That’s why we’re so … dead. Most of my friends are dead, you know; we have these piles of corpses to dinner.