Stephen Fry Quotes
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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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Money no longer has any meaning. Civilization is coming to an end. If not the destruction of the world, it's an endless stalemate.
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I expected the illegible and the deeply buried in me to be read as if carved on my forehead, just as I expected the obvious and the ill-concealed to be hidden from view.
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I get an urge, like a pregnant elephant, to go away and give birth to a book.
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Somehow, as a writer, you tend to use words to paper over structural cracks.
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You can never hope to recapture the first fine careless rapture as the poet put it, but it stays with you like a good acid trip.
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Generally, we admire the thing we are not.
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If you go looking for loonies and religious fanatics and dropouts and freaks, I dare say you'll find it.
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Between funny and witty Falls the shadow
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there is no reason why anyone should understand how it works… and of course no reason why anyone should care … unless you are curious, in which case I love you, for curiosity about the world and all its corners is a beautiful thing.
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I believe that poetry is a primal impulse within us all.
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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 shouldn't be saying this, high treason really, but I sometimes wonder if Americans aren't fooled by our accent into detecting a brilliance that may not really be there.
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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.
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My secret is that I have never thought there is a secret to anything in life. Passion. Love. Drive. Work. Work. Work. Dull but true.
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The most important philosophy I think is that even if it isn't true you must absolutely assume there is no afterlife.
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I was happy there. Which is to say I was not unhappy there. Unhappiness and happiness I have always been able to carry about with me, irrespective of place and people, because I have never joined in.
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Supporting the English cricket team is like supporting a second division football team. I support Norwich City football team and when they lose I really don't mind because I expect them to; but when we win I'm so happy - much happier than any Arsenal supporter could ever be.
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You can't reason yourself back into cheerfulness any more than you can reason yourself into an extra six inches in height.
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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.
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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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There can't be that many individual souls. Not souls like mine. There isn't room. There can't be.
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My parents were marvelously educated people.
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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.