Stephen Fry Quotes
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Everything had been based on a kind of certainty, a sense of man at the center of things, a sense of order and hierarchy. And suddenly, almost simultaneously, extraordinary discoveries are made.
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Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.
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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.
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I think the fact that I'm so well known to be gay makes it very difficult to have a convincing relationship with a woman on screen. It wouldn't be at all difficult for me to kiss a woman - I'll kiss a frog if you like.
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Wisdom is probably the ability to cope. That's why someone who has to walk seven miles every day to get water for their children can be wiser than someone sitting behind a desk in Wall Street.
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My first words, as I was being born [...] I looked up at my mother and said, 'that's the last time I'm going up one of those.
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I am aware of the technical distinction between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’, and between ‘uninterested’ and ‘disinterested’ and ‘infer’ and ‘imply’, but none of these are of importance to me. ‘None of these are of importance,’ I wrote there, you’ll notice – the old pedantic me would have insisted on “none of them is of importance”. Well I’m glad to say I’ve outgrown that silly approach to language
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Oh, it takes a lot for me to walk out of a film.
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I flicked my eyes over to Steve again and saw him straighten. He would need a diversion just to start. “Explanations?” I bellowed. “Explanations? There’s your explanation…there!” I stabbed a finger dramatically towards the far corner of the room. Pathetic, really. I mean, talk about the oldest trick in the book. But it’s a good book, and the trick would have been cut from subsequent editions if it didn’t sometimes work.
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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.
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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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Talent is inborn, but technique is learned.
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I'm afraid I was very much the traditionalist. I went down on one knee and dictated a proposal which my secretary faxed over straight away.
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Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise".
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I think we have all experienced passion that is not in any sense reasonable.
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Those who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it.
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The point about manic depression or bipolar disorder, as it's now more commonly called, is that it's about mood swings. So, you have an elevated mood. When people think of manic depression, they only hear the word depression. They think one's a depressive. The point is, one's a manic-depressive.
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Philosophy is an odd thing. When we use the word in everyday speech, you know, you sometimes hear it hilariously.
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Things are always worse in the steady watches of the night.
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I think my view is that whenever you project into the future you're never likely to be accurate in the details, or the paraphernalia and style. It's in the spirit of it.
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It is exhausting knowing that most of the time the phone rings, most of the time there's an email, most of the time there's a letter, someone wants something of you.
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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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My father was all brain and little heart.
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Life, that can shower you with so much splendour, is unremittingly cruel to those who have given up.