Stephen Fry
90 quotes
Biography
Sir Stephen John Fry is an English actor, comedian, writer, and broadcaster. He began his career on the sketch comedy series Alfresco (1983–1984) and the sitcom Blackadder (1986–1989), before gaining recognition as part of the comedy duo Fry and Laurie alongside Hugh Laurie, appearing together in A Bit of Fry & Laurie (1989–1995) and Jeeves and Wooster (1990–1993).
"I'd probably want to teach at university, because children would drive me insane. I suspect it would be English literature, Shakespeare and so forth. I've always been deeply, deeply in love with that kind of thing."
"Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators."
"It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me."
"An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them."
"It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more... than a whine. 'I find that offensive.' It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. 'I am offended by that.' Well, so fucking what."[I saw hate in a graveyard -- Stephen Fry, The Guardian, 5 June 2005]"
"Stop feeling sorry for yourself and you will be happy."
"I am a lover of truth, a worshiper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance."
"No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time."
"It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe, but not worth bothering with."
"People who can change and change again are so much more reliable and happier than those who can’t"
"Wine can be a better teacher than ink, and banter is often better than books"
"I'm fat because I'm greedy, and if my mind is fat it's because I'm curious."
"...Catholic versus Protestant, essentially. It's that kind of fight. ... And it goes on to this day. Will we never learn? Who knows? Religion. Shit it."
"I think it was Horry Walpole who remarked, “In this life one should try everything once except incest and country dancing.” It is an excellent rule, as I remarked to my mother in bed last night."
"If I had a large amount of money I should certainly found a hospital for those whose grip upon the world is so tenuous that they can be severely offended by words and phrases and yet remain all unoffended by the injustice, violence and oppression that howls daily about our ears."
"I don't need you to remind me of my age, I have a bladder to do that for me."
"I have always disbelieved that Sicilian saying about revenge being a dish best served cold. I feel that--don't you?--when I see blinking, quivering octogenarian Nazi war criminals being led away in chains. Why not then? It's too late now. I want to see them taken back in time and punished then...Blame, certainly, is a dish only edible when served fresh and warm. Old blames, grudges and scores congeal and curdle and cause the most terrible indigestion."
"I have to mime at parties when everyone sings Happy Birthday . . . mime or mumble and rumble and growl and grunt so deep that only moles, manta rays and mushrooms can hear me."
"I know that my early life was at one and the same time so common as to be unremarkable, and so strange as to be the stuff of fiction. I know of course that this is how all human lives are, but that it is only given to a few of us to luxuriate in the bath of self-revelation, self-curiosity, apology, revenge, bafflement, vanity and egoism that goes under the name Autobiography. You have seen me at my washpot scrubbing at the grime of years: to wallow in a washpot may not be the same thing as to be purified and cleansed, but I have come away from this very draining, highly bewildering and passionately intense few months feeling slightly less dirty. Less dirty about the first twenty years of my life, at least. The second twenty, now that is another story."
"It is a cliché that most clichés are true, but then like most clichés, that cliché is untrue."
"My mother has an absolute passion for sour fruit and can strip a gooseberry bush quicker than a priest can strip a choirboy."
"It is, I know, for I have experienced it perhaps twice in my life, an awful privilege to be too much loved and perhaps the kindest thing I ever did in my life was never to let Matthew know to what degree he had destroyed my peace and my happiness."
"I remember nothing of this, no ambulance rides, nothing. Nothing between switching out the bedside lamp and the sudden indignity of rebirth: the slaps, the brightness, the tubing, the speed, the urgent insistence that I be choked back into breathing life. I have felt so sorry for babies ever since."
"LSD reveals the whatness of things, their quiddity, their essence. The wateriness of water is suddenly revealed to you, the carpetness of carpets, the woodness of wood, the yellowness of yellow, the fingernailness of fingernails, the allness of all, the nothingness of all, the allness of nothing. For me music gives access to every one of these essences of existence, but at a fraction of the social or financial cost of a drug and without the need to cry 'Wow!' all the time, which is one of LSD's most distressing and least endearing side-effects."
"Life, that can shower you with so much splendour, is unremittingly cruel to those who have given up."