Stephen Fry Quotes
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If I were to believe in a god l would believe in gods. I think monotheism is the really ghastly thing. That is the absolutely staggering to me misapprehension.
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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.
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...as absurd and dishonest as claiming that the trouble with computer games is that they stop people watching television.
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As I say I don't want to kill myself, I just wouldn't mind dying.
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Philosophy is an odd thing... 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.
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The other man's arse is always cleaner!
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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.
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I said it before and I’ll say it again: books are dead, plays are dead, poems are dead: there’s only movies. Music is still okay, because music is sound track. Ten, fifteen years ago, every arts student wanted to be a novelist or a playwright. I’d be amazed if you could find a single one now with such a dead-end ambition. They all want to make movies. Not write movies. You don’t write movies. You make movies.
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Literature is the only access to truth we have on this planet.
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When push-off comes to shove-off, a man must have a reason to get out of bed in the mornings, something more than the threat of bedsores, at any rate.
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The part of [Oscar] Wilde was exceptionally important to me; the man, his achievements, his wisdom, but his downfall, his disgrace and the tragic and bitter end to it have always fascinated, appalled and attracted me since childhood. It was he who first in some measure vindicated my sexuality.
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I shall sustain a massive erection, that’s what, and I shan’t be answerable for the consequences. Some kind of ejaculation is almost bound to ensue and if either of you were to become pregnant I should never forgive myself.
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This new England we have invented for ourselves is not interested at all in education. It is only interested in training, both material and spiritual. Education means freedom, it means ideas, it means truth. Training is what you do to a pear tree when you pleach it and prune it to grow against a wall. Training is what you give an airline pilot or a computer operator or a barrister or a radio producer. Education is what you give children to enable them to be free from the prejudices and moral bankruptcies of their elders.
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This is the point. One technology doesn't replace another, it complements. Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.
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The stranger might laugh and seem to enjoy the writing, but you hug to yourself the thought that they didn't quite understand its force and quality the way you do - just as your friends (thank heavens) don't also fall in love with the person you are going on and on about to them.
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I can understand the Greek idea that there are these these principles of lightening or of war or of wisdom and to embody them, to personify them into a Athena or Aries or whichever god you want makes enormous sense.
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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.
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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.
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You think I have more than most people dream of? What other people dream of doesn't matter. I always had less than I ever dreamt of. All I ever dreamt of was family. A father and a mother. Most people don't even need to dream of such luxuries, they take them for granted. That is what I used to dwell on, alone in my bedroom. I dwelt as all children do, on the injustice. Injustice is the most terrible thing in the world, Oliver. Everything that is evil springs from it and only a cheap soul can abide it without anger.
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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.
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It's a great privilege just to be in a film not because you're some packaging that some agent has done with the studio exec: "We need a John Travolta film."
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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.
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People still don't get how astounding Darwinism is. People think what shocked everybody was that Charles Darwin seemed to be saying we had descended from apes.
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Where LGBT and mental health issues collide is over stigma. And stigma is society's problem not the problem of the LGBT or mental health community. What we have to deal with is the ignorance, fear and prejudice that blight the lives of those who have nothing wrong with them in any moral or transgressive sense. It is society that is ill.