Stephen Fry Quotes
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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.
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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'.
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I like to wake up each morning and not know what I think, that I may reinvent myself in some way.
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There are some things I don't like, about which I think, well, that's me. But coriander is a giant hoax perpetrated by a perverted society.
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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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Hell, I am young. I am free. My teeth are clean. The sun shines. To hell with everything else
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Zoologists have reckoned there are up to at least 750 species of animal that have been observed exhibiting same-sex behaviour, or gender role transformation (which is very common in a wide range of fauna). There is only one species on earth, however, which has exhibited homophobia or transphobia. And that is the species homo sapiens sapiens. Us. So let's not allow the foolish, ignorant or bigoted ever to use words like "natural."
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A cut glass English accent can fool unsuspecting Americans into detecting a brilliance that isn't there
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Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.
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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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Entry is not equivalent to possession.
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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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It’s the strangest thing about this church - it is obsessed with sex, absolutely obsessed. Now they will say we, with our permissive society and rude jokes, are obsessed. No, we have a healthy attitude. We like it, it’s fun, it’s jolly; because it’s a primary impulse it can be dangerous and dark and difficult. It’s a bit like food in that respect, only even more exciting. The only people who are obsessed with food are anorexics and the morbidly obese, and that in erotic terms is the Catholic church in a nutshell.
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An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.
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Naturally I've known girlies form an attachment to the younger male before now, but in the tennis score of the bedroom most girls in my experience would rather Love Thirty or Love Forty than Love Fifteen. Men, of course, are a whole other issue; they start at Love All and stay there until they're dragged from the court
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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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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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One of the most intensely unlikeable figures of the twentieth century, fanatical anti-Semite, enemy of labour unions and proud recipient of medals from Nazi Germany, where Hitler held him in veneration, Henry Ford was also an employer who paid his workers more than his competitors, an innovator who pioneered the assembly line and a visionary whose part in the creation of the twentieth century was so great that Aldous Huxley, in his Brave New World, prefigured a society whose calendar was divided into BF and AF-Before Ford and After Ford.
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Oh, it takes a lot for me to walk out of a film.
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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.
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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.
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You can act in five, six, or seven films in the time it takes to direct one film.
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Self-consciousness, that's what it is. Always my abiding vice. I keep seeing myself. Me watching myself watching others watch me. How do you lose that? What's the trick?
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If we empower ourselves with responsibility over our actions, responsibility over our destinies and responsibility for directing and maintaining and creating our own ethical and moral frameworks, which is the most important thing really isn’t it because perhaps the greatest insult to humanism is this idea that mankind needs a god in order to have a moral framework.