Top 44 Hugh Laurie Quotes

I have always stuck up for Western medicine. You can chew all the celery you want, but without antibiotics, three quarters of us would not be here.

I don’t have a single complete show or movie or anything else that I could look at and say, ‘Nailed that one.’ But endless dissatisfaction is, I suppose, what gets us out of bed in the morning.

I don’t like the act of talking; it makes me slightly light-headed.

I feel like a hostage to fortune. Not that I am complaining. I wanted to play the role. But in truth I didn’t think the show would be such a success. OK, I thought it would fail. Not because it was bad. I was confident it was good, but plenty of good things just sort of wither on the vine.

Some people are drawn naturally – there are natural guitarists, and there are natural piano players, and I think guitar implies travel, a sort of footloose gypsy existence. You grab your bag and you go to the next town.

Driving a motorcycle is like flying. All your senses are alive. When I ride through Beverly Hills in the early morning, and all the sprinklers have turned off, the scents that wash over me are just heavenly. Being House is like flying, too. You’re free of the gravity of what people think.

I think maybe even one of the reasons I became an actor was actually to hide. I mean, it sounds paradoxical because, of course, people are standing up in a public place and encouraging other people to look at them. So that’s not the conventional definition of hiding.

I get anxious about a lot of things, that’s the trouble. I get anxious about everything. I just can’t stop thinking about things all the time. And here’s the really destructive part – it’s always retrospective. I waste time thinking of what I should have said or done.

Pain is an event. It happens to you, and you deal with it in whatever way you can.

I never went to drama school, I don’t have any certificates saying: ‘He’s a qualified actor.’ But I did think that ‘House’ was something I didn’t have to apologise for. It was something I was really proud of and it was sort of… whether you liked it or not, it was undeniable.

I think my father gave me a great reverence for medical science. He was about as opposite to the personality of House as one could imagine. He was polite and easygoing, and would have gone to great lengths to make his patients feel attended to and heard and sympathized with.

I hate menus, I hate choosing food. I just want to be brought. Bring me dinner!

I’m finding it increasingly difficult to simply walk down the street. In New York, I dashed in to buy a big pair of sunglasses to conceal myself, but the guy behind the counter shouted ‘Hey! It’s Dr. House.’

I admit I can’t shake the idea that there is virtue in suffering, that there is a sort of psychic economy, whereby if you embrace success, happiness and comfort, these things have to be paid for.

I personally believe that the iPod is a frankly corrosive device because it encourages you to surround yourself with your favorites. The whole idea of a playlist is to surround yourself with your favorite things, and the interesting thing is that when you do that, they cease to be your favorites.

I have been instrumental in banning bottled water on the set. It hasn’t gone that well with the crew… so I replaced it with tequila.

The financing of all TV shows is dictated by finding an audience between 18 and 49. I have now passed beyond 49, so probably, I am no longer a desirable commodity for TV. And I am at peace with that; that’s fine.

To be able to pretend to be something that I’m frankly not is very liberating and exciting.

The glory of American television is Dennis Franz.

I wouldn’t be able to act like Al Pacino or play the piano like Dr. John, But I could probably act better than Dr. John and play the piano better than Al Pacino.

Girls are complicated. The instruction manual that comes with girls is 800 pages, with chapters 14, 19, 26 and 32 missing, and it’s badly translated, hard to figure out.

Piano was – well, all musical instruments were taught in this very rigid, formal, classical method when I was young.

Muddy Waters, I suppose, was my first great hero. You know, every boy wants to be a guitar player, and Muddy Waters was just the king. He was the King Bee. He was it.

I’ve never been clever with money. I will buy anything at the top of the market.

I feel like I’m working on an oil rig right now. I’m away from home a lot.

I was too shy, I think, to sing publicly. It takes a particular kind of person. And when I was young, I was not that person. In the first instance, when a record company said to me, do you want to try and make your record, my first reaction was, no, I’m not worthy – I couldn’t possibly, and so on and so forth.

Screenwriting is the most prized of all the cinematic arts. Actually, it isn’t, but it should be.

Lots of people would say House doesn’t have any charm at all. I would disagree, though: I find him immensely charming and endlessly entertaining. He has a sort of grace and a wit about him, and ultimately, I think he is on the side of the angels.

The strange thing – and this is one of the advantages of being incredibly shallow and superficial – is that wherever I am, that’s sort of home.

Acting is largely about putting on masks, and music is about removing them.

Seems to me that this business, for actors anyway, is not so much about whether or not you do good work. It’s about whether or not you get the chance to do good work.

In film, because you know where the ending is, characters can change, but in television, you substitute revelation for change, and that can be hard to pull off.

I think of House as a deeply moral character, though some would no doubt argue with me. He does not judge. Beyond his normal tetchiness, there were no more than a half-dozen moments of actual condemnation from him. He understood lies and also why you lied, and there was an absolution there that is very, very appealing.

The first big stars, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, you know, these were gigantic stars. I even wonder sometimes whether all music actually comes from women, whether the first glimmering of music is a mother soothing a baby.

I never was someone who was at ease with happiness.

I run six-to-eight miles a day, plus weights and aerobics in the lunch hour. I also lie a lot, which keeps me thin.

I do actually like Los Angeles. Partly because I was told I wouldn’t.

I’m reasonably easygoing. Messing up my lines or making a fool of myself is where you find my fears. Like a lot of English people, I’m prey to embarrassment – the dread that everyone’s sort of sniggering at you, that you’re going to look like an idiot. I think that sort of halts us all.

I don’t think of myself as funny. I think of myself as rather grave, actually. And I’m suspicious of fun. I never quite know what that is or how to deal with it or how to generate it. That’s my fault. I know it’s a burden on the people I’m with. It’s tiresome.

I don’t talk like House, or walk like him. I certainly don’t think like him. I don’t like to think for more than 15 minutes at a stretch actually; I am a fragile flower.

I think there is a basic comfort in clever people who know things.

I never thought I’d end up living in Los Angeles while my children grew up in Britain, but here I am, and we are all making the best of it.

The great trap for non-American actors trying to play Americans, I think, is to start thinking of American-ness as a characteristic. It isn’t. It is no more a character trait than height. It is just a physical fact, and that’s all there is to it.

I didn’t realize House would be the central character, more the bitter comic relief appearing occasionally. I relish his wounded nature – the lameness, the scarred Byronic hero.