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.

But if one could go back in time, I'd love to have been directed by Howard Hawks, who's one of my great heroes. One of the greatest directors there ever was. He directed probably one of the greatest westerns of all time in 'Rio Bravo'.

I almost once wanted to publish a self help book saying, 'How To Be Happy, by Stephen Fry: Guaranteed Success'. And people buy this huge book and it's all blank pages, and the first page would just say, 'Stop feeling sorry for yourself--and you will be happy.'

One of the traps of adolescence is the sort of paranoid resentment that somehow you're never going to match up and that everybody else's life is going to be better and finer and fuller. That everyone else attended some secret lesson in which how to live was taught and you had a dental appointment that day, or you were somehow not invited. And the point of great writers like Wilde is that they make that invitation to you.

Nudity is a deep worry if you have a body like a bin bag full of yoghurt, which I have.

I suppose that there is no point wasting time being lazy, though of course indolence in a divine way, actually has its advantages.

One of the reasons I love the online world is that although that exists in abundance you can choose absolutely which part of the online world you want to live in. You can make your own kingdom in that sense.