Stephen Fry Quotes
- All Quotes
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To me, reason is as spiritual as anything else, the beauty of reason seems to me indelible and ineffable and numinous... the spirit is after all the same word we use to describe... essence
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Coming out as gay was an easy enough matter for me, since I worked in a profession where being gay had a long history of being accepted.
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Lectures broke into one's day and were clearly a terrible waste of time, necessary no doubt if you were reading law or medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English, the natural thing to do was talk a lot, listen to music, drink coffee and wine, read books, and go to plays, perhaps be in plays.
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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.
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Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.
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Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.
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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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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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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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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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Old Professors never die, they just lose their faculties.
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...the reality of intelligent British speech... uses blasphemus, coital and cloacal expletives as a matter of course.
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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.
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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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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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An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.
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Oh, it takes a lot for me to walk out of a film.
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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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Mind you, Mount Rushmore isn't exactly the Parthenon or the Sistine Chapel either. After the naïve daftness of the Crazy Horse monument, I find the pompous idiocy of those four presidents somehow more risible still. Wishing to show respect or feel a vicarious thrill of admiration and pride, I can only giggle. For which I am very sorry. Any loyal American reading this who feels outraged and insulted is free to explode with derisive snorts of laughter at any British equivalent.
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P. G. Wodehouse... used, when in town, to solve the problem of the long walk to the post-office by the simple expedient of tossing his letters out of his window: his belief that the average human, finding a stamped and addressed envelope on the pavement, would naturally pop it into the nearest pillar-box was never once, in decades, shown to be unfounded.
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Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.
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Part of life is learning what to be ashamed of and what to be proud of.
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What's magical about [bears] is that they just spend one-hundred percent of every minute of every hour of every day being a bear. And a tree-frog spends all of its time being a tree-frog. We spend all our time trying to be somebody else.