Stephen Fry Quotes
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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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As children everyone thinks their family is weird and they're upset by the weirdness of their own family.
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One of the traps of adolescence is the sort of paranoid resentment that somehow you're never going to match up and that everybody else's life is going to be better and finer and fuller. That everyone else attended some secret lesson in which how to live was taught and you had a dental appointment that day, or you were somehow not invited. And the point of great writers like Wilde is that they make that invitation to you.
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I like to think of myself at home in the armchair, writing, smoking and occasionally wandering down the shop.
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If you think you're going to have an eternity in which you can talk to Mozart and Chopin and Schopenhauer on a cloud and learn stuff and you know really get to grips with knowledge and understanding and so you won't bother now, I think it's a terrible, a terrible mistake.
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Better sexy and racy Than sexist and racist
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Sex without smiling is as sickly and as base as vodka and tonic without ice.
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It is a cliche that most cliches are true, but then like most cliches, that cliche is untrue.
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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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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.
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In a dung heap, even a plastic bead can gleam like a sapphire.
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I have Van Gogh's ear for music
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A month's salary, deep regret, the telephone number of some foul rehab clinic and my lance was free.
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I almost once wanted to publish a self help book saying, 'How To Be Happy, by Stephen Fry: Guaranteed Success'. And people buy this huge book and it's all blank pages, and the first page would just say, 'Stop feeling sorry for yourself--and you will be happy.'
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You've just had the most imponderable joy of watching charlieissocoollike, which makes you, like, cool.
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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.
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Sometimes there just isn't enough vomit in the world.
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Glory never arrives through the front door. She sneaks in uninvited round the back or through an upstairs window while you are sleeping.
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I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.
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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.
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Great and good men and women stirred sugar into their coffee knowing that it had been picked by slaves. Kind, good ancestors of all of us never questioned hangings, burnings, tortures, inequality, suffering and injustice that today revolt us. If we dare to presume to damn them with our fleeting ideas of morality, then we risk damnation from our descendants for whatever it is that we are doing that future history will judge as intolerable and wicked: eating meat, driving cars, appearing on TV, visiting zoos, who knows?
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And of course you are mad, if by a madman we mean a mind that questions and rejects every civilized norm.
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I believe that poetry is a primal impulse within us all.
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It's now very common to hear people say 'I'm rather offended by that'.