Stephen Fry Quotes
- All Quotes
-
Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.
-
Knowing what I now know I would never have done anything so fatuous; but then I never would have known what I know now had I not.
-
I never quite dare to believe I'm brave enough to be an artist, but I'm on the side of artists. I think of myself as a bit of a Salieri, looking with longing eyes at Mozart.
-
I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.
-
Oh, it takes a lot for me to walk out of a film.
-
The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane.
-
I was born Mary Patterson, but then I married and naturally took my husband's name, so now I'm Neil Patterson.
-
You don't need a Harvard MBA to know that the bedroom and the boardroom are just two sides of the same ballgame.
-
I have pushed the boat out as far as I should in terms of taking on too many things. I'm getting older and I just could not take it any more. I am now monitoring myself very closely and I'm just trying not to get into that sort of state again.
-
I may have looked happy but inside I was hopelessly depressed.
-
I was at a dinner party many years ago,sitting along from Tom Stoppard, who in those days smoked not just between courses,but between mouthfuls. An American woman watched in disbelief. "And you so intelligent!" "Excuse me?" said tom "Knowing those things are going to kill you" she said "and still you do it." "How differently I might behave" Tom said, "if immortality were an option
-
The people I know who swear the most tend to have the widest vocabularies.
-
We always make the mistake, the fatal mistake in the case of military people, of imagining that each war will be a kind of version of the one that happened previously.
-
They are just 100 per cent bear, whereas human beings feel we're not 100 per cent human, that we're always letting ourselves down. We're constantly striving towards something, to some fulfilment.
-
It's now very common to hear people say 'I'm rather offended by that'.
-
Talent is inborn, but technique is learned.
-
Education is the sum of what students teach each other between lectures and seminars.
-
If a thing can be said in ten words, I may be relied upon to take a hundred to say it. I ought to apologize for that. I ought to prune, pare and extirpate excess growth, but I will not. I like words—strike that, I love words—and while I am fond of the condensed and economical use of them in poetry, in song lyrics, in Twitter, in good journalism and smart advertising, I love the luxuriant profusion and mad scatter of them too.
-
A university is not, thank heavens, a place for vocational instruction, it has nothing to do with training for a working life and career, it is a place for education, something quite different.
-
My first meeting with you only confirmed what I first suspected. You are a fraud, a charlatan and a shyster. My favourite kind of person, in fact.
-
A cut glass English accent can fool unsuspecting Americans into detecting a brilliance that isn't there
-
I met too frankly preposterous, if it weren't for their banal evil, politicians and pastors who told knowing lies about the evils of homosexuality in order to attract bigger flocks to their churches and more votes and power to their corrupt councils. LGBT people seem to be being scapegoated more and more just as at the same time in more enlightened countries more and more freedom to express themselves, marry, be given official intersex status and so on is offered.
-
Weather is real. It is absolutely real: when it rains, it rains – you get wet, there is no question about it. It is also true about weather that you can’t control it; you can’t say if I wish hard enough it won’t rain. It is equally true that if the weather is bad one day it will get better and what I had to learn was to treat my moods like the weather.
-
Places of incredible glamour, possibility, power, excitement and pleasure. Love your libraries!