Stephen Fry Quotes

I've always had great respect for Paddington because he is amusingly English and eccentric. He is a ...

there is no reason why anyone should understand how it works… and of course no reason why anyone sho...

lectures broke into one's day and were clearly a terrible waste of time, necessary no doubt if you w...

I was at a dinner party many years ago,sitting along from Tom Stoppard, who in those days smoked not...

It does not suit the world to hear that people who are leading a high life, an enviable life, a priv...

There are young men and women up and down the land who happily (or unhappily) tell anyone who will l...

Entirely in accordance with what education is supposed to be. Education is the sum of what students ...

Wine can be a better teacher than ink, and banter is often better than books

Those who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it.

But you can't argue that the world isn't in an unhealthy moral state.""Wouldn't think of it dearest....

If you spend your life on a moral hill-top, you see nothing but the mud below. If, like me, you live...

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

Nobody seems to understand that in such matters the tact and sympathy should come from the one who i...

He's your enemy, Donald!''He most certainly is not,' said Trefusis. 'Not unless I say so. He may dea...

Cheat? Good heavens, this is an amateur cricket match amongst leading prep schools, I'm an Englishma...

Once, in his first term, Cartwright had been bold enough to ask him why he was clever, what exercise...

He was one of a long line of mimsy and embittered middle-class sensitives who disguised their feeble...

But an Adrian also knew that an Adrian's lies were real: they were lived and felt and acted out as t...

Either a municipal bog is a private place or it isn't. If it is a private place in which to shit, ho...

There can't be that many individual souls. Not souls like mine. There isn't room. There can't be.

This is what you have to understand. You grew up, you went to this school and that one, you made the...

He knew he could never jingle change in his pocket or park his car like a confident adult, he was th...

Great writers, I discovered, were not to be bowed down before and worshipped, but embraced and befri...

The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, v...

Thos who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it.

I will defend the absolute value of Mozart over Miley Cyrus, of course I will, but we should be wary...

Read it wisely, Little One, for the power of ignorance is great.

There were people who believed their opportunities to live a fulfilled life were hampered by the num...

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

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

I like to think of this little [newspaper] column as a brassière, or do I mean brasserie? Brazier, p...

I used many times to touch my own chest and feel, under its asthmatic quiver, the engine of the hear...

As I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement an...

And if the best you can do is quote the Bible in defence of your prejudice, then have the humility t...

Music is everything and nothing. It is useless and no limit can be set on its use. Music takes me to...

Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the wor...

But one day he said to me:‘I’ve got it now. It’s reading isn’t it?’‘I’m sorry?’‘You read a lot, don’...

People who can change and change again are so much more reliable and happier than those who can’t

There is simply no limit to the tyrannical snobbery that otherwise decent people can descend into wh...

It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, a...

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will always hurt me. Bones mend and become actually ...

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

They had been there. I had seen my mother’s anxious face, desperate to catch my eye and give me a wa...

I suppose this was the first time I had ever felt an urge not to be. Never an urge to die, far less ...

Sex without smiling is as sickly and as base as vodka and tonic without ice.

Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that ...

It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame ...

Today it was commerce that Europe valued and it was the businessmen who, having exploited what the s...

The biggest challenge facing the great teachers and communicators of history is not to teach history...

If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn’t a straig...

There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphr...

I cannot bear natural light when I'm writing.

It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms...

You can't just say there is a god because the world is beautiful. You have to account for bone cance...

How dare you? How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault? It's ...

I used to think it utterly normal that I suffered from “suicidal ideation” on an almost daily basis....

The alarm in the morning? Well, I have an old tape of Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the Vienna Phil...

Seriousness is no more a guarantee of truth, insight, authenticity or probity, than humour is a guar...

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

The uncomfortable, as well as the miraculous, fact about the human mind is how it varies from indivi...

I have written it before and am not ashamed to write it again. Without Wodehouse I am not sure that ...

I’ve found that it’s of some help to think of one’s moods and feelings about the world as being simi...

There are times when I'm doing QI and I'm going, 'Ha ha, yeah, yeah,' and inside I'm going 'I want t...

I think the fact that I'm so well known to be gay makes it very difficult to have a convincing relat...

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

Mental health is one of the last great taboos.

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

We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does thing...

You are aware that what they do, they do for the world, and the results are, of course, magnificent....

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

Look at the kind of people who most object to the childishness and cheapness of celebrity culture. D...

Just let the words fly from your lips and your pen. Give them rhythm and depth and height and sillin...

Taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once. It is an insult to creation not to expe...

... Our language, tiger, our language: hundreds of thousands of available words, frillions of legiti...

I'm fat because I'm greedy, and if my mind is fat it's because I'm curious.

It’s the strangest thing about this church - it is obsessed with sex, absolutely obsessed. Now, they...

Stop feeling sorry for yourself and you will be happy.

We gave you a perfectly good language and you f***ed up.

When you get just a complete sense of blackness or void ahead of you, that somehow the future looks ...

Compromise is a stalling between two fools.

Certainly the most destructive vice if you like, that a person can have. More than pride, which is s...

Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.

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

You are who you are when nobody's watching.

It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certai...

Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complime...

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

...Catholic versus Protestant, essentially. It's that kind of fight. ... And it goes on to this day....

A true thing, poorly expressed, is a lie.

It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certai...