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.

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.

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.

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.

If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn’t a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather. Try to understand the blackness, lethargy, hopelessness, and loneliness they’re going through. Be there for them when they come through the other side. It’s hard to be a friend to someone who’s depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do.

You are who you are when nobody's watching.

When you take a lot of cocaine powder you tend to take a lot of alcohol with it as well, so for many years really I never went out without at least four or five grams of cocaine powder.

It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriousity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.

Wine can be a better teacher than ink, and banter is often better than books

I never quite dare to believe I'm brave enough to be an artist, but I'm on the side of artists. I think of myself as a bit of a Salieri, looking with longing eyes at Mozart.

As I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters but me.

You can't just say there is a God because well, the world is beautiful. You have to account for bone cancer in children. You have to account for the fact that almost all animals in the wild live under stress with not enough to eat and will die violent and bloody deaths. There is not any way that you can just choose the nice bits and say that means there is a God and ignore the true fact of what nature is.

There comes a time when the blankness of the future is just so extreme, it's like such a black wall of nothingness. Not of bad things like a cave full of monsters and so, you're afraid of entering it. It's just nothingness, the void, emptiness and it is just horrible. It's like contemplating a future-less future and so you just want to step out of it. The monstrosity of being alive overwhelms you.

After the shooting of John Lennon and the early death of so many great stars and the utter naked venal mercantile marketing of pop music and rock music, I don't think anyone really believes that music is anything more than another commodity.

People who can change and change again are so much more reliable and happier than those who can’t

It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe, but not worth bothering with.

It's hard to be a friend to someone who's depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do.

I suppose the thing that really interests me is what mankind did with the big, big, big discoveries that have created our modern age.

I suppose the thing I most would have liked to have known or been reassured about is that in the world, what counts more than talent, what counts more than energy or concentration or commitment, or anything else - is kindness. And the more in the world that you encounter kindness and cheerfulness - which is its kind of amiable uncle or aunt - the better the world always is. And all the big words: virtue, justice, truth - are dwarfed by the greatness of kindness.

I am gay. I am a Jew. My mother lost over a dozen of her family to Hitler's anti-Semitism. Every time in Russia (and it is constantly) a gay teenager is forced into suicide, a lesbian 'correctively' raped, gay men and women beaten to death by neo-Nazi thugs while the Russian police stand idly by, the world is diminished and I for one, weep anew at seeing history repeat itself.

I have always been an impassioned advocate for the works of Shakespeare. I regard him as one of the most complete miracles of his or any other age.

Everything had been based on a kind of certainty, a sense of man at the center of things, a sense of order and hierarchy. And suddenly, almost simultaneously, extraordinary discoveries are made.

Great writers, I discovered, were not to be bowed down before and worshipped, but embraced and befriended. Their names resounded through history not because they had massive brows and thought deep incomprehensible thoughts, but because they opened windows in the mind, they put their arms round you and showed you things you always knew but never dared to believe. Even if their names were terrifyingly foreign and intellectual sounding, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire or Cavafy, they turned out to be charming and wonderful and quite unalarming after all.

This is the point. One technology doesn't replace another, it complements. Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.

Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise".

I do think it's important not to be absolutely sure, so sure that you can't reinvent yourself in some way, or at least rediscover the truth of why you think what you think, and not just take it as an assumption.

If I had a large amount of money I should certainly found a hospital for those whose grip upon the world is so tenuous that they can be severely offended by words and phrases and yet remain all unoffended by the injustice, violence and oppression that howls daily about our ears.

Compromise is a stalling between two fools.

I do believe that almost everything I do is based on my feelings, not on my intellect. Though But we won't chase ourselves up the particular sentiment, or we'll get lost.

A cousin of mine who was a casualty surgeon in Manhattan tells me that he and his colleagues had a one-word nickname for bikers: Donors. Rather chilling.

I think Eros should be dirty. In Greek legend, as I'm sure you are aware, he fell in love with the minor deity Psyche. It was the Greek way of saying that, in spite of what it may believe, Love pursues the Soul, not the body; the Erotic desires the Psychic. If Love was clean and wholesome he wouldn't lust after Psyche.

Better sexy and racy Than sexist and racist

Why should I be depressed? I've got enough money. I've got a job. People like me. There is no to be depressed. That's at stupid as saying there is no reason to have asthma or there is no reason to have the measles. You know you've got it. It's there. It's not about reason.

Hell, I am young. I am free. My teeth are clean. The sun shines. To hell with everything else

There is no right language or wrong language any more than there are right or wrong clothes.

What makes a good family? Well, I suppose obviously love. Love lubricated often I think by humor. I think a family that can laugh at each other and tease themselves and who are able to be jolly with each other I think is the key.

As if a device can function if it has no style. As if a device can be called stylish that does not function superbly... yes, beauty matters. Boy, does it matter. It is not surface, it is not an extra, it is the thing itself.

Families where there is not much laughter I think are signs of some sort of dysfunctionality or sickness.

As children everyone thinks their family is weird and they're upset by the weirdness of their own family.

Atheism is not just about not believing there is a God, but on the assumption that there is one, what kind of God is he?

The English language is an arsenal of weapons. If you are going to brandish them without checking to see whether or not they are loaded, you must expect to have them explode in your face from time to time.

I may have looked happy but inside I was hopelessly depressed.

As I say I don't want to kill myself, I just wouldn't mind dying.

Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers