Hugh Laurie Quotes

To be a head boy, you have to be very clever, you have to be a scholar, and I was never a scholar in any shape or form.

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.

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

I couldn't imagine what Fox thought they were doing, contemplating such a jagged protagonist for a prime-time drama. I only knew that I wanted the role very much.

People assume that I'm very highly trained, that I studied and did years and years of Shakespeare. I have no training whatsoever and I've only done one Shakespeare play at university. If people want to believe that, I'm happy to go along with it.

There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now.

Having a vote once every four years is not the same thing as democracy.

I just read an 800-page history of the Scottish Enlightenment and, honestly, I may as well just start it again now, because I cannot remember a single thing. I can barely remember where Scotland is.

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

Believe it or not, perhaps I don't show it much, or well, but I think I like people.

Success on a cosmic level completely eludes me. I'm deeply suspicious of things being too good. It's part of my superstition, I think, to generate pain in order to give the illusion of gain. I'm not saying I reject success, but honestly, I don't quite know how to deal with it. It's an old feeling: As soon as you have the thing you've been going after all your life, that reasonable degree of security, you start kicking against it, doubting it.

I don't believe in God, but I have this idea that if there were a God, or destiny of some kind looking down on us, that if he saw you taking anything for granted he'd take it away.

I remember watching Mel Gibson on some show once, and he was being asked about his belief in the afterlife. Gibson said: 'Well, I can't believe this is all there is'. And I thought: 'Wait a minute. You're Mel Gibson. You have millions of dollars. You're a great-looking chap with every conceivable blessing that could be bestowed upon a man. And that's not good enough ?'

Winning a rowing race is not like winning anything else. Here's my theory: you're facing backwards, so you're looking at the people you're beating--and there's something exquisite about that.

I have my moments. Ever since I was a boy, I never was someone who was at ease with happiness. Too often I embrace introspection and self-doubt. I wish I could embrace the good things.

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.

As a real person, he wouldn't last a minute, would he? But drama is about imperfection. And we've moved away from the aspirational hero. We got tired of it, it was dull. If I was House's friend, I would hate it. How he so resolutely refuses to be happy or take the kind-hearted road. But we don't always like morally good people, do we?

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

My dad gave me my first bike at 16. I soon fell off and was in a wheelchair for weeks. I haven't fallen since.

LA runs on optimism, enthusiasm and flattery. I think you can go a little bit crazy... It's just too damn sunny in every dimension - weatherwise, socially and professionally.

I have a reverence for medicine because I hero-worshiped my father [a former doctor], and because I admire doctors, I admire study, empiricism and rational thought. I don't study, empiricize or think rationally myself - but I admire it in others.

One of the principal goals in my life has been to avoid embarrassing my children by doing the job I do. I hope I've managed to do that, and I hope that, with the job I'm in now, they are, if not proud, at least unembarrassed by it. I must say, my three are most agreeable children, who do nothing but delight me.

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

I grew up with an impatience with the anti-scientific. So I'm a bit miffed with our current love affair with all things Eastern. If I sneeze on the set, 40 people hand me echinacea. But I'd no sooner take that than eat a pencil. Maybe that's why I took up boxing. It's my response to men in white pajamas feeling each other's chi.

To tell you the truth, the older I get, the less I know. I keep meeting people, both older and younger, who seem to have accrued so much more knowledge or expertise or certainty about who they are and the jobs they do. I just marvel at it.

I think pain is a very - it's an extremely hard thing to empathize moment to moment. And you often don't remember your own pain, you know, that moment that you broke a limb or you burned yourself or, I think, this is a common thing that women talk about with childbirth, that the memory of the pain is hard to summon up and relive, thankfully.

I am very, very aware at all times. I'm watching myself, I'm listening to myself, I'm judging myself, critiquing myself all the time, and I will know when I do something and I will immediately say, "Can I do another one, because I didn't quite get that thing," or that I wanted to do something there and it didn't quite work.

I rowed for Cambridge. I was pretty good at that.

Driving a motorcycle is like flying. All your senses are alive.

You hope that your teenage self would like and forgive your 50-year-old self.

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.

This was the tricky bit. The really tricky bit, trickiness cubed.

I travel to work on my motorcycle, so it's jeans, boots and a brown Aero leather jacket that weighs as much as I do. If it were black, it would seem like I've got a Brando idea going on, which I don't.

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 have resolved to pick one novel and just read it over and over again for the rest of my life, because I cannot remember anything anymore.

Humility was considered a great virtue in my family household. No show of complacency or self-satisfaction was ever tolerated. Patting yourself on the back was definitely not encouraged, and pleasure or pride would be punishable by death.

Riding my motorcycle around L.A. is like my own video game. But unlike many folks at the wheel, I am occupied with getting where I'm going and keeping myself safe. Most people are applying makeup, texting, and checking out the beauty in the next car.

Now, my mom always said two wrongs don't make a right. But she never said anything about four wrongs, and that always left me confused.

It's a holy city for music.

Just because it's a bad job doesn't mean I need to do it badly.

One great benefit of not being on TV every week is that people will be a lot less interested in what I have in my supermarket basket. I could even un-tint my car windows - or at least opt for a lighter shade.

Driving a motorcycle is like flying. All your senses are alive. Being House is like flying, too. He's free of the gravity of what people think.

In books, day breaks, and night falls. In life, night rises from the ground. The day hangs on for as long as it can, bright and eager, absolutely and positively the last guest to leave the party, while the ground darkens, oozing night around your ankles, swallowing for ever that dropped contact lens, making you miss that low catch in the gully on the last ball of the last over.

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

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.

Newton's Third Law of Conversation, if it existed, would hold that every statement implies an equal and opposite statement. To say that I'd turned the offer down raised the possibility that I might not have done.

They, all of them, work incredibly hard to make me seem clever and heroic, neither of which I am.