They decided to separate after nearly 20 years of marriage in January 2009.

Mr Jones said: “We had a lot of problems, like money problems, me working and Jan doing all the work at home, relying on friends to help take the children to school. We tried to make it work but we couldn’t. We thought we would get divorced and see what happened. I moved out and got a room and I was coming around seeing the children every time I could.”

The pair stayed amicable for the sake of their kids and were in constant phone and text contact.

Mr Jones said: “I’m used to the children and Jan being around me and being on my own was like something was missing out of my life. We were texting each other and ringing and I was coming around all the time. It was the worst time of my life.”

Link

Here’s a sample quote:

“When I suddenly discovered that I could sit down with a blank sheet of paper and two hours later I could have written something that then made people laugh — this was an extraordinary moment for me, and I thought, ‘My goodness, I am creative.’ So, because I had been brought up as a scientist — I got into Cambridge on Science — I started observing what was going on when I was creating.

… The first thing that I noticed was that when I was trying to write a sketch at night and I got stuck or I couldn’t think of an ending, or I couldn’t see how to continue the sketch, I would go to bed. And when I woke up in the morning and made myself a cup of coffee and went back to my desk and looked at the problem, not only was the solution to this problem immediately apparent to me, but I couldn’t even remember what the problem had been the previous night. … I began to believe that this business of ’sleeping on the problem’ … was absolutely extraordinary.”

Another choice Cleese nugget after the jump.

“To know how good you are at something requires the same skills that it does to be good at that thing. Which means, if you’re absolutely hopeless at something, you lack exactly the skills that you need to know that you’re absolutely hopeless at it. And this is a profound discovery. That most people who have absolutely no idea what they’re doing, have absolutely no idea that they have no idea what they’re doing. It explains a great deal of life. It explains, particularly, Hollywood.”

(Via Kung Fu Grippe, the awesome blog of Merlin Mann; he got it from Tape Noise Diary who got it from Broadcasting Brain.)

1. Mr. Rogers was totally red-green color blind and couldn’t distinguish between tomato soup and pea soup. He asked a colleague to taste his soup one day and tell him what flavor he had gotten. Knowing that he liked both, she asked why he didn’t just tuck in. “If it’s tomato soup, I’ll put sugar in it,” he said.
2. Samuel Clemens. At least, that’s the word on the street – I couldn’t find a good story to back it up.

3. Paul Newman wanted to be a pilot for the Navy. It was during the flight physical that he discovered he was color blind. Instead, Newman trained to be a radioman and a gunner and, obviously, eventually went on to become an actor.

4. Meat Loaf, on the other hand, tried to fail his Army physical by listing his numerous ailments: he was color blind, 68 pounds overweight, had a trick shoulder and was prone to concussions. He was drafted anyway.

5. Jack Nicklaus. As Sports Illustrated puts it, dude “couldn’t tell you a green number from a red on a leader board if the winner’s check depended on it.”

6. Bing Crosby. Bing’s loud clothing was fodder for many jokes back in the day – Bob Hope especially relished zinging Der Bingle for his bad taste. But it’s no wonder that Bing picked out such tacky pieces – he was, quite literally, color blind. “He will think something is a beautiful blue,” his wife once explained, “and it will turn out to be a bilious green.”
7. Matt Lauer has a mild case of color-blindness, but that hasn’t stopped him from being named best-dressed man on several lists, including Vanity Fair’s.

8. Howie Mandel is color blind, which probably doesn’t really hinder him in his job on Deal or No Deal. But back in the day when he was selling carpet, it could be a problem. “There were a lot of ugly homes in Toronto because of me,” he said in an interview.

9. Emerson Moser. OK, he’s not famous, but I felt his story was worth telling. Moser was Crayola’s senior-most crayon maker: after 37 years of employment he had molded more than 1.4 billion crayons. It wasn’t until he retired that he revealed a secret: his blue-green color blindness meant that he couldn’t see all of the colors he was making.

10. Hugh Downs is also in the color blind club. His wife helped him with clothing choices by number-coding things – one group of items that went together would all have “1” on them; another group would be clustered by “2”s and so on.

Do you know of any others? Or are you color blind? If so, do you get sick of people asking “What color is this?” all of the time? Let us know about your experiences in the comments!