Stephen Fry Quotes

Coming out as gay was an easy enough matter for me, since I worked in a profession where being gay had a long history of being accepted.

Life, that can shower you with so much splendour, is unremittingly cruel to those who have given up.

Estate agents: like them or loathe them, you'd be mad not to loathe them.

How can one not be fond of something that the Daily Mail despises?

Thank you for your input; I can tell you are struggling towards being interesting.

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 we understand every single secret of the universe, there will still be left the eternal mystery of the human heart.

Weather is real. It is absolutely real: when it rains, it rains – you get wet, there is no question about it. It is also true about weather that you can’t control it; you can’t say if I wish hard enough it won’t rain. It is equally true that if the weather is bad one day it will get better and what I had to learn was to treat my moods like the weather.

Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.

My parents were marvelously educated people.

I really do believe that there are those who would like and trust me better if they saw me weeping into a whisky, making a fool of myself, getting aggressive, maudlin and drunkenly out of control. I have never found those states in others anything other than tiring, awkward, embarrassing and fantastically dull, but I am quite sure that people would cherish a view of me in that condition at least once in a while.

If you know someone who's depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn't a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather.

In a dung heap, even a plastic bead can gleam like a sapphire.

The point about manic depression or bipolar disorder, as it's now more commonly called, is that it's about mood swings. So, you have an elevated mood. When people think of manic depression, they only hear the word depression. They think one's a depressive. The point is, one's a manic-depressive.

You either get Norfolk, with its wild roughness and uncultivated oddities, or you don't. It's not all soft and lovely. It doesn't ask to be loved.

I get an urge, like a pregnant elephant, to go away and give birth to a book.

There is no right language or wrong language any more than there are right or wrong clothes.

How can I tell you what I think until I've heard what I'm going to say?

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

The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriousity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.

Living with bipolar, schizophrenia or any other mental condition takes a recognition that one has a chronic condition that needs managing. The management can be through pharmaceutical intervention, talk therapy, mindfulness programmes, diet and exercise changes, all kinds of things.

I'm afraid I don't believe there is such a thing as blasphemy, just outrage from those insecure in their own faith.

Picture this scene. A critic arrives at the gates of heaven. 'And what did you do?' asks Saint Peter. 'Well', says the dead soul. 'I criticised things'. 'I beg your pardon?' 'You know, other people wrote things, performed things, painted things and I said stuff like, "thin and unconvincing", "turgid and uninspired", "competent and serviceable,"...you know'.

The most important philosophy I think is that even if it isn't true you must absolutely assume there is no afterlife.

But an Adrian also knew that an Adrian's lies were real: they were lived and felt and acted out as thoroughly as another man's truths - if other men had truths - and he believed it possible that this last lie might see him through to the grave.

I think faith in each other is much harder than faith in God...

You've just had the most imponderable joy of watching charlieissocoollike, which makes you, like, cool.

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.

You think I have more than most people dream of? What other people dream of doesn't matter. I always had less than I ever dreamt of. All I ever dreamt of was family. A father and a mother. Most people don't even need to dream of such luxuries, they take them for granted. That is what I used to dwell on, alone in my bedroom. I dwelt as all children do, on the injustice. Injustice is the most terrible thing in the world, Oliver. Everything that is evil springs from it and only a cheap soul can abide it without anger.

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.

The church has no power over our lives any more, which is something of a blessing for those who do not enjoy red-hot pokers or iron thumb-screws.

I shall sustain a massive erection, that’s what, and I shan’t be answerable for the consequences. Some kind of ejaculation is almost bound to ensue and if either of you were to become pregnant I should never forgive myself.

We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I'm going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.

We humans are naturally disposed to worship gods and heroes, to build our pantheons and valhallas. I would rather see that impulse directed into the adoration of daft singers, thicko footballers and air-headed screen actors than into the veneration of dogmatic zealots, fanatical preachers, militant politicians and rabid cultural commentators.

If a thing can be said in ten words, I may be relied upon to take a hundred to say it. I ought to apologize for that. I ought to prune, pare and extirpate excess growth, but I will not. I like words—strike that, I love words—and while I am fond of the condensed and economical use of them in poetry, in song lyrics, in Twitter, in good journalism and smart advertising, I love the luxuriant profusion and mad scatter of them too.

Because, let's face it, I do not get offered the parts that Brad Pitt has just turned down.

Part of life is learning what to be ashamed of and what to be proud of.

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.

I said it before and I’ll say it again: books are dead, plays are dead, poems are dead: there’s only movies. Music is still okay, because music is sound track. Ten, fifteen years ago, every arts student wanted to be a novelist or a playwright. I’d be amazed if you could find a single one now with such a dead-end ambition. They all want to make movies. Not write movies. You don’t write movies. You make movies.

The alarm in the morning? Well, I have an old tape of Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in a perfectly transcendent version in Shubert's seventh symphony. And I've rigged it up so that at exactly 7:30 every morning it falls from the ceiling onto my face.

I'm afraid I was very much the traditionalist. I went down on one knee and dictated a proposal which my secretary faxed over straight away.

I flicked my eyes over to Steve again and saw him straighten. He would need a diversion just to start. “Explanations?” I bellowed. “Explanations? There’s your explanation…there!” I stabbed a finger dramatically towards the far corner of the room. Pathetic, really. I mean, talk about the oldest trick in the book. But it’s a good book, and the trick would have been cut from subsequent editions if it didn’t sometimes work.

When push-off comes to shove-off, a man must have a reason to get out of bed in the mornings, something more than the threat of bedsores, at any rate.

First love is unrequited ultimately because it’s so huge.It’s such an act of giving and it requires so much back that it can never be given back. It’s like an atom bomb. It’s like… It’s all the energy of who you are and who you want to be and what you love and what you hope to be explodes. It is impossible for a single... human being to offer that back to you in a mutual way.

If there is a sort of national American emotion I would call it optimism. If there is an English one I would call it embarrassment - not even pessimism - just sheer shame, embarrassment and confusion.

I will defend the absolute value of Mozart over Miley Cyrus, of course I will, but we should be wary of false dichotomies. You do not have to choose between one or the other. You can have both. The human cultural jungle should be as varied and plural as the Amazonian rainforest. We are all richer for biodiversity. We may decide that a puma is worth more to us than a caterpillar, but surely we can agree that the habitat is all the better for being able to sustain each.

You don't sit down and write a wish list about the person you are going to fall violently in love with. It just doesn't work like that.

No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time.