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Home
Authors
Stephen Fry
British
Comedian
About the author
Old Professors never die, they just lose their faculties.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#Old
It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh... Robert Schumann has been mentioned... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath... some of them with rather grim ends.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#Men
#Women
You can't reason yourself back into cheerfulness any more than you can reason yourself into an extra six inches in height.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#Reason
#Cheerfulness
Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the word's full octave.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#Love
#Word
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.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#Idea
#Wrong
#Body
#Sexuality
Many people would no more think of entering journalism than the sewage business - which at least does us all some good.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#People
#Business
#Journalism
Moving from chair to chair, from coffee machine to coffee machine is the limit of my action in most films. But I enjoy being cast in them because I love watching them.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#Action
#Love
#Being
#Coffee
#Machine
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.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#Love
#Idea
#Actor
#Journey
Oh, it takes a lot for me to walk out of a film.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#Film
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.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#People
#Friends
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.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#Insult
#Experience
#Creation
#Garden
#Taste
#Temperance
#Wickedness
That one can love another of the same gender, that is what the homophobe really cannot stand.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#Love
#Gender
There is so much we can learn from TV. It's a window on the world.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#World
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.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
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.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#Purpose
#Sense
#Word
#Future
#Despair
#Direction
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.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#Love
#Work
An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#Idea
It only takes a room of Americans for the English and Australians to realise how much we have in common.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#English
#Americans
When you've seen a nude infant doing a backward somersault you know why clothing exists.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#Being
#Intellect
It is a cliche that most cliches are true, but then like most cliches, that cliche is untrue.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#Cliches
But happiness is no respecter of persons.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#Happiness
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.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#Government
#Regret
#Victory
Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#First
#Christmas
#Proof
#Travel
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.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#Acting
#Years
#Day
#Writing
#Writer
#Actor
#Grave
I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#Freedom
#Language
#Truth
#Purity
#Tolerance
I don't need you to remind me of my age. I have a bladder to do that for me.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#Age
I don't watch television, I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#Art
#Television
#Talking
I have pushed the boat out as far as I should in terms of taking on too many things. I'm getting older and I just could not take it any more. I am now monitoring myself very closely and I'm just trying not to get into that sort of state again.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#Now
#State
#Trying
I like to think of myself at home in the armchair, writing, smoking and occasionally wandering down the shop.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#Home
#Writing
#Smoking
I shouldn't be saying this - high treason, really - but I sometimes wonder if Americans aren't fooled by our accent into detecting brilliance that may not really be there.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#Wonder
#Saying
#May
#Americans
#Treason
I think my view is that whenever you project into the future you're never likely to be accurate in the details, or the paraphernalia and style.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#Style
#Future
#Project
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.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#Respect
#Books
#English
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.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#Woman
#Fact
#Kiss
#Gay
I think we have all experienced passion that is not in any sense reasonable.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#Sense
#Passion
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.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#Want
#Love
#Children
#English
#Literature
#Shakespeare
#University
I get an urge, like a pregnant elephant, to go away and give birth to a book.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
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.
Stephen Fry,
British
Comedian
#Time
#Love
#Heroes
#Hawks