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Stephen Fry Quotes | Quotes said by Stephen Fry

  • Stephen Fry Quote #1

    ... Our language, tiger, our language: hundreds of thousands of available words, frillions of legitimate new ideas... And yet, oh, and yet, we, all of us, spend all our days saying to each other the same things time after weary time: I love you, Don't go in there, Get out, You have no right to say that, Stop it, Why should I, That hurt, Help, Marjorie is dead.


  • Stephen Fry Quote #2

    ...Catholic versus Protestant, essentially. It's that kind of fight. ... And it goes on to this day. Will we never learn? Who knows? Religion. Shit it.

  • Stephen Fry Quote #3

    [his healing skills] ..lay in the ability to comfort, to comfort in the proper sense, to make strong, to fortify

  • Stephen Fry Quote #4

    An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.

  • Stephen Fry Quote #5

    Anger fed him and clothed him and he owed it much.

  • Stephen Fry Quote #6

    Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.

  • Stephen Fry Quote #7

    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.

  • Stephen Fry Quote #8

    But happiness is no respecter of persons.

  • Stephen Fry Quote #9

    But just as we can all agree on what is red, even if we will never know if we each see it in the same way, so we can all agree - can’t we? - that no matter how confident we may appear to others, inside we are all sobbing, scared and uncertain for much of the time. Or perhaps it’s just me.

    Oh God, perhaps it really is just me.

    Actually it doesn’t really matter, when you come to think of it. If it is just me, then you are reading the story of some weird freak. You are free to treat this book like science fiction, fantasy or exotic travel literature. Are there really men like Stephen Fry on this planet? Goodness, how alien some people are. And if I am not alone, then neither are you, and hand in hand we can marvel together at the strangeness of the human condition.

  • Stephen Fry Quote #10

    But you can't argue that the world isn't in an unhealthy moral state.

    Wouldn't think of it dearest. People lie, cheat, rape, swindle, kill, maim, torture and destroy. Bad thing. People also pop into bed together and cosy up. Good thing. If we think fucking is a sign of moral decay then we're a little bit stupid-stupid, aren't we?

  • Stephen Fry Quote #11

    Certainly the most destructive vice if you like, that a person can have. More than pride, which is supposedly the number one of the cardinal sins - is self pity. Self pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have. And the most destructive. It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred, and I think actually hatred's a subset of self pity and not the other way around - ' It destroys everything around it, except itself '.

    Self pity will destroy relationships, it'll destroy anything that's good, it will fulfill all the prophecies it makes and leave only itself. And it's so simple to imagine that one is hard done by, and that things are unfair, and that one is underappreciated, and that if only one had had a chance at this, only one had had a chance at that, things would have gone better, you would be happier if only this, that one is unlucky. All those things. And some of them may well even be true. But, to pity oneself as a result of them is to do oneself an enormous disservice.

    I think it's one of things we find unattractive about the american culture, a culture which I find mostly, extremely attractive, and I like americans and I love being in america. But, just occasionally there will be some example of the absolutely ravening self pity that they are capable of, and you see it in their talk shows. It's an appalling spectacle, and it's so self destructive. 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 '. Use the rest of the book to write down your interesting thoughts and drawings, and that's what the book would be, and it would be true. And it sounds like 'Oh that's so simple', because it's not simple to stop feeling sorry for yourself, it's bloody hard. Because we do feel sorry for ourselves, it's what Genesis is all about.

  • Stephen Fry Quote #12

    Cheat? Good heavens, this is an amateur cricket match amongst leading prep schools, I'm an Englishman and a schoolmaster supposedly setting an example to his young charges. We are playing the most artistic and beautiful game ever devised. Of course I'll cunting well cheat. Now, give me my robe and put on my crown. I have immortal longings in me.

  • Stephen Fry Quote #13

    Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me.

  • Stephen Fry Quote #14

    Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.

  • Stephen Fry Quote #15

    Either a municipal bog is a private place or it isn't. If it is a private place in which to shit, how is it not a private place in which to fellate?

  • Stephen Fry Quote #16

    Entirely in accordance with what education is supposed to be. Education is the sum of what students teach each other in between lectures and seminars. You sit in each other's rooms and drink coffee - I suppose it would be vodka and Red Bull now - you share enthusiasms, you talk a lot of wank about politics, religion, art and the cosmos and then you go to bed, alone or together according to taste. I mean, how else do you learn anything, how else do you take your mind for a walk?

  • Stephen Fry Quote #17

    Forget ideas, Mr. Author.
    What kind of pen do you use?

  • Stephen Fry Quote #18

    Great writers, I discovered, were not to be bowed down before and worshipped, but embraced and befriended. Their names resounded through history not because they had massive brows and thought deep incomprehensible thoughts, but because they opened windows in the mind, they put their arms round you and showed you things you always knew but never dared to believe. Even if their names were terrifyingly foreign and intellectual sounding, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire or Cavafy, they turned out to be charming and wonderful and quite unalarming after all.

  • Stephen Fry Quote #19

    Happiness is no respecter of persons.

  • Stephen Fry Quote #20

    Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.

  • Stephen Fry Quote #21

    He had just reached the pavement and gave now the smallest, quickest of glances back up the hill, in our direction. Our eyes didn’t meet, but I saw that he was even more beautiful than I had supposed. Even more beautiful than I had ever imagined it was possible to imagine imagining beauty. Beautiful in a way that made me realise that I had never even known before what beautiful really meant: not in people, nature, taste or sound.

  • Stephen Fry Quote #22

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

  • Stephen Fry Quote #23

    I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.

  • Stephen Fry Quote #24

    I cannot bear natural light when I'm writing.

  • Stephen Fry Quote #25

    I don't need you to remind me of my age. I have a bladder to do that for me.

  • Stephen Fry Quote #26

    I have written it before and am not ashamed to write it again. Without Wodehouse I am not sure that I would be a tenth of what I am today -- whatever that may be. In my teenage years, his writings awoke me to the possibilities of language. His rhythms, tropes, tricks and mannerisms are deep within me.
    But more than that, he taught me something about good nature. It is enough to be benign, to be gentle, to be funny, to be kind.

  • Stephen Fry Quote #27

    I like to think of this little [newspaper] column as a brassière, or do I mean brasserie? Brazier, possibly. All three! A column that lifts, separates, supports, serves excellent cappuccino and crackles merrily with sweet-smelling old chestnuts.

  • Stephen Fry Quote #28

    I suppose this was the first time I had ever felt an urge not to be. Never an urge to die, far less an urge to put an end to myself - simply an urge not to be. This disgusting, hostile and unlovely world was not made for me, nor I for it.

  • Stephen Fry Quote #29

    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 Quote #30

    I used many times to touch my own chest and feel, under its asthmatic quiver, the engine of the heart and lungs and blood and feel amazed at what I sensed was the enormity of the power I possessed. Not magical power, but real power. The power simply to go on, the power to endure, that is power enough, but I felt I had also the power to create, to add, to delight, to amaze and to transform.

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