Stephen Fry Quotes

Wisdom is probably the ability to cope. That's why someone who has to walk seven miles every day to get water for their children can be wiser than someone sitting behind a desk in Wall Street.

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. It's in the spirit of it.

If you go looking for loonies and religious fanatics and dropouts and freaks, I dare say you'll find it.

I believe that poetry is a primal impulse within us all.

My father was all brain and little heart.

A book is judged, not by its reference to life, but by its reference to other books.

There is not any way that you can just choose the nice bits and say that means there is a God and ignore the true fact of what nature is.

It's certainly easy to mock some things ... Oddly enough though I've never found it easy to mock anything of value. Only things that are tawdry and fatuous - perhaps it's just me.

As children everyone thinks their family is weird and they're upset by the weirdness of their own family.

You can act in five, six, or seven films in the time it takes to direct one film.

Mankind can live free in a society hemmed in by laws, but we have yet to find a historical example of mankind living free in lawless anarchy.

...the reality of intelligent British speech... uses blasphemus, coital and cloacal expletives as a matter of course.

A film star is a kind of public monument, and everyone's staring at them, and they've kind of got railings around them, and they're rather miserable most of the time.

I never quite dare to believe I'm brave enough to be an artist, but I'm on the side of artists. I think of myself as a bit of a Salieri, looking with longing eyes at Mozart.

Self-consciousness, that's what it is. Always my abiding vice. I keep seeing myself. Me watching myself watching others watch me. How do you lose that? What's the trick?

I do believe that almost everything I do is based on my feelings, not on my intellect. Though But we won't chase ourselves up the particular sentiment, or we'll get lost.

Money and fame are trashy and don't guarantee happiness, but we all refuse really to know it.

Everything had been based on a kind of certainty, a sense of man at the center of things, a sense of order and hierarchy. And suddenly, almost simultaneously, extraordinary discoveries are made.

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.

And of course you are mad, if by a madman we mean a mind that questions and rejects every civilized norm.

I was happy there. Which is to say I was not unhappy there. Unhappiness and happiness I have always been able to carry about with me, irrespective of place and people, because I have never joined in.

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

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

If I were to believe in a god l would believe in gods. I think monotheism is the really ghastly thing. That is the absolutely staggering to me misapprehension.

But happiness is no respecter of persons.

If there were a God he would want us to be better spirited than to take his word for everything.

Philosophy is an odd thing. When we use the word in everyday speech, you know, you sometimes hear it hilariously.

Glory never arrives through the front door. She sneaks in uninvited round the back or through an upstairs window while you are sleeping.

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

Places of incredible glamour, possibility, power, excitement and pleasure. Love your libraries!

Just as it is the love of money that is the root of all evil, it is the belief in shamefulness that is the root of all misery.

Now, bipolar disorder, it goes on a spectrum. There's very severe conditions of it and there are milder ones. I'm lucky enough that it's reasonably mild in my case.

I think people talk about one love, but there is the need to love and the need to be loved are not the same thing and I suppose that's... and it's working that out is part of growing up.

When you take a lot of cocaine powder you tend to take a lot of alcohol with it as well, so for many years really I never went out without at least four or five grams of cocaine powder.

Oh, it takes a lot for me to walk out of a film.

As humourless a lump of dough as ever held a torchlight vigil outside the South African Embassy or stuck an AIDS awareness ribbon on an unwilling first-nighter.

I certainly don't want to be formulaic. I want to be honest and authentic and everything else.

Atheism comes into rather a bad press and I suppose I'd rather describe myself as a humanist... I don't believe in God. I don't believe there is a God.

There are some things I don't like, about which I think, well, that's me. But coriander is a giant hoax perpetrated by a perverted society.

Between funny and witty Falls the shadow

My parents were marvelously educated people.

Money no longer has any meaning. Civilization is coming to an end. If not the destruction of the world, it's an endless stalemate.

There is simply no limit to the tyrannical snobbery that otherwise decent people can descend into when it comes to music.

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

I found it all about as arousing as a Tupperware party.

Wit can be beautiful, because it expresses and distills an idea.

Things are always worse in the steady watches of the night.

My first meeting with you only confirmed what I first suspected. You are a fraud, a charlatan and a shyster. My favourite kind of person, in fact.

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

Come back, and do that thing, be lovely to each-other.