Words matter. These are the best Stephen Fry Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
There’s no doubt that I do have extremes of mood that are greater than just about anybody else I know.
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.
Somehow, as a writer, you tend to use words to paper over structural cracks.
Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.
Generally, we admire the thing we are not.
There is no particular Socratic or Dimechian or Kantian way to live your life. They don’t offer ethical codes and standards by which to live your life.
Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the word’s full octave.
To be human and to be adult means constantly to be in the grip of opposing emotions, to have daily to reconcile apparently conflicting tensions. I want this, but need that. I cherish this, but I adore its opposite too.
Now, bipolar disorder, it goes on a spectrum. There’s very severe conditions of it and there are milder ones. I’m lucky enough that it’s reasonably mild in my case.
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.
Philosophy is an odd thing. When we use the word in everyday speech, you know, you sometimes hear it hilariously.
Because, let’s face it, I do not get offered the parts that Brad Pitt has just turned down.
I went to Cambridge and thought I would stay there. I thought I would quietly grow tweed in a corner somewhere and become a Don or something.
Having been an actor and a writer for so long – 20 years or so – I felt that it would be daft to go to one’s grave without having directed. It’s a natural extension of writing and acting, and so I knew it would happen one day.
Taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once. It is an insult to creation not to experience it fully. Temperance is wickedness.
When you’ve seen a nude infant doing a backward somersault you know why clothing exists.
Happiness is no respecter of persons.
I think we have all experienced passion that is not in any sense reasonable.
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.
When you get just a complete sense of blackness or void ahead of you, that somehow the future looks an impossible place to be, and the direction you are going seems to have no purpose, there is this word despair which is a very awful thing to feel.
You can act in five, six, or seven films in the time it takes to direct one film.
There is so much we can learn from TV. It’s a window on the world.
I feel I would love to close down for a number of years in some way and just be in the country making pork pies and chutneys and never have to poke my head out of the parapet.
As someone who worked hard for a Labour victory in the 90s, do I regret it? Not really. It was bound to happen. And it’ll happen with the next government, and the one after it. Because all governments serve us. They serve the filth.
No, I love the idea that someone changes. As an actor it’s always the thing that you look for. He is someone who starts off bright, cheerful and confident and then has everything taken away from him. It’s a wonderful journey to take.
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.
It was extremely important to show that Wilde’s sexuality was not just some intellectual idea. It was real, and it was about the human body. To just have mentioned it and not shown it would have been, I think, peculiar and wrong.
Personally, I’d never seen a graphic novel. I knew they existed because friends of mine like Jonathan Ross collect them and some very literate and intelligent people really rate the graphic novel as a form.
It is a cliche that most cliches are true, but then like most cliches, that cliche is untrue.
I like to think of myself at home in the armchair, writing, smoking and occasionally wandering down the shop.
I’m a bit of a coward, and lazy, oddly enough.
My father was all brain and little heart.
If you go looking for loonies and religious fanatics and dropouts and freaks, I dare say you’ll find it.
I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.
An original idea. That can’t be too hard. The library must be full of them.
It only takes a room of Americans for the English and Australians to realise how much we have in common.
I’ve always had great respect for Paddington because he is amusingly English and eccentric. He is a great British institution and my generation grew up with the books and then Michael Horden’s animations.
That one can love another of the same gender, that is what the homophobe really cannot stand.
My life, at least, is divided between writing and performing and mixtures of the two.
But happiness is no respecter of persons.
