Stephen Fry Quotations

I don't need you to remind me of my age. I have a bladder to do that for me.

They are just 100 per cent bear, whereas human beings feel we're not 100 per cent human, that we're always letting ourselves down. We're constantly striving towards something, to some fulfilment.

I shouldn't be saying this - high treason, really - but I sometimes wonder if Americans aren't fooled by our accent into detecting brilliance that may not really be there.

It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh... Robert Schumann has been mentioned... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath... some of them with rather grim ends.

Generally, we admire the thing we are not.

It only takes a room of Americans for the English and Australians to realise how much we have in common.

It is exhausting knowing that most of the time the phone rings, most of the time there's an email, most of the time there's a letter, someone wants something of you.

Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.

Taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once. It is an insult to creation not to experience it fully. Temperance is wickedness.

When you get just a complete sense of blackness or void ahead of you, that somehow the future looks an impossible place to be, and the direction you are going seems to have no purpose, there is this word despair which is a very awful thing to feel.

You can't reason yourself back into cheerfulness any more than you can reason yourself into an extra six inches in height.

It is a cliche that most cliches are true, but then like most cliches, that cliche is untrue.

I'd probably want to teach at university, because children would drive me insane. I suspect it would be English literature, Shakespeare and so forth. I've always been deeply, deeply in love with that kind of thing.

The point about manic depression or bipolar disorder, as it's now more commonly called, is that it's about mood swings. So, you have an elevated mood. When people think of manic depression, they only hear the word depression. They think one's a depressive. The point is, one's a manic-depressive.

To be human and to be adult means constantly to be in the grip of opposing emotions, to have daily to reconcile apparently conflicting tensions. I want this, but need that. I cherish this, but I adore its opposite too.

Personally, I'd never seen a graphic novel. I knew they existed because friends of mine like Jonathan Ross collect them and some very literate and intelligent people really rate the graphic novel as a form.

I'm a bit of a coward, and lazy, oddly enough.

I went to Cambridge and thought I would stay there. I thought I would quietly grow tweed in a corner somewhere and become a Don or something.

Having been an actor and a writer for so long - 20 years or so - I felt that it would be daft to go to one's grave without having directed. It's a natural extension of writing and acting, and so I knew it would happen one day.

I don't believe there is a God. If I were to believe in a god, l would believe in gods.

I feel I would love to close down for a number of years in some way and just be in the country making pork pies and chutneys and never have to poke my head out of the parapet.

No, I love the idea that someone changes. As an actor it's always the thing that you look for. He is someone who starts off bright, cheerful and confident and then has everything taken away from him. It's a wonderful journey to take.

An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.

Moving from chair to chair, from coffee machine to coffee machine is the limit of my action in most films. But I enjoy being cast in them because I love watching them.

I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.

I think the fact that I'm so well known to be gay makes it very difficult to have a convincing relationship with a woman on screen. It wouldn't be at all difficult for me to kiss a woman - I'll kiss a frog if you like.

Old Professors never die, they just lose their faculties.

That one can love another of the same gender, that is what the homophobe really cannot stand.

There is so much we can learn from TV. It's a window on the world.

Oh, it takes a lot for me to walk out of a film.

There is no particular Socratic or Dimechian or Kantian way to live your life. They don't offer ethical codes and standards by which to live your life.

I think we have all experienced passion that is not in any sense reasonable.

You don't sit down and write a wish list about the person you are going to fall violently in love with. It just doesn't work like that.

But if one could go back in time, I'd love to have been directed by Howard Hawks, who's one of my great heroes. One of the greatest directors there ever was. He directed probably one of the greatest westerns of all time in 'Rio Bravo'.

Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the word's full octave.

If you go looking for loonies and religious fanatics and dropouts and freaks, I dare say you'll find it.

It was extremely important to show that Wilde's sexuality was not just some intellectual idea. It was real, and it was about the human body. To just have mentioned it and not shown it would have been, I think, peculiar and wrong.

My life, at least, is divided between writing and performing and mixtures of the two.

Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.

I don't watch television, I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.

When you've seen a nude infant doing a backward somersault you know why clothing exists.

I have pushed the boat out as far as I should in terms of taking on too many things. I'm getting older and I just could not take it any more. I am now monitoring myself very closely and I'm just trying not to get into that sort of state again.

I like to think of myself at home in the armchair, writing, smoking and occasionally wandering down the shop.

Because, let's face it, I do not get offered the parts that Brad Pitt has just turned down.

My father was all brain and little heart.

I've never had any illusions about being a lead actor in films, because lead actors have to be of a certain kind. Apart from the beauty of looks and figure, which I cannot claim to have, there's just a particular kind of ordinary-Joe quality that a film star needs to have.

I don't watch TV. I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.

Philosophy is an odd thing. When we use the word in everyday speech, you know, you sometimes hear it hilariously.

I've always had great respect for Paddington because he is amusingly English and eccentric. He is a great British institution and my generation grew up with the books and then Michael Horden's animations.

I think my view is that whenever you project into the future you're never likely to be accurate in the details, or the paraphernalia and style. It's in the spirit of it.

You can act in five, six, or seven films in the time it takes to direct one film.

I get an urge, like a pregnant elephant, to go away and give birth to a book.

There's no doubt that I do have extremes of mood that are greater than just about anybody else I know.

Somehow, as a writer, you tend to use words to paper over structural cracks.

As someone who worked hard for a Labour victory in the 90s, do I regret it? Not really. It was bound to happen. And it'll happen with the next government, and the one after it. Because all governments serve us. They serve the filth.

These women work incredibly hard. They take drugs for the same reason a truck driver takes drugs. To stay awake and do their job. Like steroids, these are performance-enhancing drugs.

There's a piano in my house, and I play when no one's around - but as soon as anyone listens, my confidence goes and I lose my sense of rhythm.

it's important to make that show. You have to go away for at least a month and then do an interview with a talk show.

I could rent a room, paint it black, bolt on a few chains and call it my punishment room, Then have men in posing pouches in the background.

The service took place on one of those afternoons that occur only in the past.

Those who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it.

I am aware of the technical distinction between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’, and between ‘uninterested’ and ‘disinterested’ and ‘infer’ and ‘imply’, but none of these are of importance to me. ‘None of these are of importance,’ I wrote there, you’ll notice – the old pedantic me would have insisted on “none of them is of importance”. Well I’m glad to say I’ve outgrown that silly approach to language

Nudity is a deep worry if you have a body like a bin bag full of yoghurt, which I have.

Money is to Everything as an Aeroplane is to Australia. The aeroplane isn't Australia, but it remains the only practical way we know of reaching it. So perhaps, metonymically, the aeroplane is Australia after all.

One of the most unattractive human traits, and so easy to fall into, is resentment at the sudden shared popularity of a previously private pleasure. Which of us hasn't been annoyed when a band, writer, artist or television series that had been a minority interest of ours has suddenly achieved mainstream popularity? When it was at a cult level we moaned at the philistinism of a world that didn't appreciate it, and now that they do appreciate it we're all resentful and dog-in-the-manger about it.

I'm afraid I don't believe there is such a thing as blasphemy, just outrage from those insecure in their own faith.

At John Schlesinger's funeral at a synagogue in St John's Wood some years ago the person I stood next to said to me encouragingly, 'Come on, Stephen - you're not singing. Have a go!' 'Believe me, Paul, you don't want me to,' I said. Besides, I was having a much better time listening to him. 'No. Go on!' So I joined in the chorus. 'You're right,' Paul McCartney conceded. 'You can't sing.

[...] I suppose this was the first time I had ever felt an urge not to be. Never an urge to die, far less an urge to put an end to myself - simply an urge not to be. This disgusting, hostile and unlovely world was not made for me, nor I for it. It was alien to me and I to it.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will always hurt me. Bones mend and become actually stronger in the very place they were broken and where they have knitted up; mental wounds can grind and ooze for decades and be re-opened by the quietest whisper.

Picture this scene. A critic arrives at the gates of heaven. 'And what did you do?' asks Saint Peter. 'Well', says the dead soul. 'I criticised things'. 'I beg your pardon?' 'You know, other people wrote things, performed things, painted things and I said stuff like, "thin and unconvincing", "turgid and uninspired", "competent and serviceable,"...you know'.

A university is not, thank heavens, a place for vocational instruction, it has nothing to do with training for a working life and career, it is a place for education, something quite different.

Literature is the only access to truth we have on this planet.

Nature admits no hierarchy of beauty or usefulness or importance.

I was at a dinner party many years ago,sitting along from Tom Stoppard, who in those days smoked not just between courses,but between mouthfuls. An American woman watched in disbelief. "And you so intelligent!" "Excuse me?" said tom "Knowing those things are going to kill you" she said "and still you do it." "How differently I might behave" Tom said, "if immortality were an option

What other developed democracy has such a ridiculous and squalid history of intolerance? From the imprisonment and roasting of heretics, witches and poachers, to the censorship of literature, art and television: from St Alban through Wilde, Joyce and Lawrence I think we can point with pride to as grim a catalogue of intemperate, bigoted repression as any nation on earth...

Enthusiats are used to being mocked, maligned and misunderstood. We don't really mind.

I have a dark and dreadful secret. I write poetry... I believe poetry is a primal impulse within all of us. I believe we are all capable of it and furthermore that a small, often ignored corner of us positively yearns to try it.

When Steampunk meets adventure and adventure meets comedy and comedy meets ingenuity and ingenuity meets charm and charm meets wonder and wonder meets pleasure the result is a Triumph. Dr Grordbort is the future. And the past. Which makes an ideal present.

I like to wake up each morning and not know what I think, that I may reinvent myself in some way.

It's as if scientists exert every effort of will they possess deliberately to find the least significant problems in the world and explain them. Art matters. Happiness matters. Love matters. Good matters. Evil matters. Slam the fridge door. They are the only things that matter and they are of course precisely the things that science goes out of its way to ignore.

How to seperate the humiliation from the loss, that's the catch. You can never be sure if what tortures you is the pain of being without someone you love or the embarrassment of admitting that you have been rejected.

Sometimes there just isn't enough vomit in the world.

Self-consciousness, that's what it is. Always my abiding vice. I keep seeing myself. Me watching myself watching others watch me. How do you lose that? What's the trick?

Part of life is learning what to be ashamed of and what to be proud of.

Talent is inborn, but technique is learned.

Wisdom is probably the ability to cope. That's why someone who has to walk seven miles every day to get water for their children can be wiser than someone sitting behind a desk in Wall Street.

I have to mime at parties when everyone sings Happy Birthday... Mime or mumble and rumble and growl and grunt so deep that only moles, manta rays and mushrooms can hear me.

Come back, and do that thing, be lovely to each-other.

History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier. History is memory; we have to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite or a Chartist or even - if we dare, and we should dare - a Nazi. History is not abstraction, it is the enemy of abstraction.

How can I tell you what I think until I've heard what I'm going to say?

People sometimes accuse me of knowing a lot. "Stephen," they say, accusingly, "you know a lot." This is a bit like telling a person who has a few grains of sand clinging to him that he owns much sand. When you consider the vast amount of sand there is in the world such a person is, to all intents and purposes, sandless. We are all sandless. We are all ignorant. There are beaches and deserts and dunes of knowledge whose existance we have never even guessed at, let alone visited.

There can't be that many individual souls. Not souls like mine. There isn't room. There can't be.

There's nothing worse than the British in one of their fits of morality.

I'm afraid I was very much the traditionalist. I went down on one knee and dictated a proposal which my secretary faxed over straight away.

The other man's arse is always cleaner!

Thank you for your input; I can tell you are struggling towards being interesting.

The only people who are obsessed with food are anorexics and the morbidly obese. That, in erotic terms, is the Catholic church, in a nutshell.

I remember nothing of this, no ambulance rides, nothing. Nothing between switching out the bedside lamp and the sudden indignity of rebirth: the slaps, the brightness, the tubing, the speed, the urgent insistence that I be choked back into breathing life. I have felt so sorry for babies ever since.

Wit can be beautiful, because it expresses and distills an idea.

It's now very common to hear people say 'I'm rather offended by that'...