Stephen Fry Quotes

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

Cynical is the name we give those we fear may be laughing at us.

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

If you have been, I'm glad you've stopped.

A month's salary, deep regret, the telephone number of some foul rehab clinic and my lance was free.

It's a great privilege just to be in a film not because you're some packaging that some agent has done with the studio exec: "We need a John Travolta film."

I do like being surprised by directors and producers and being offered parts I would never have considered, including parts that aren't necessarily obvious but which would test me.

I've never had any illusions about being a lead actor in films, because lead actors have to be of a certain kind.

I suppose that there is no point wasting time being lazy, though of course indolence in a divine way, actually has its advantages.

I think I'm most nervous about revealing how nervous I have always been. People think me calm, confident, poised. Inside I'm a jelly.

I've always been aware of my sexuality, but I never quite knew what it meant.

I'm absolute attacking my own instinct for politeness, but I think I admire artists who just speak out or who are strong, so it's very hard.

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

I suppose the thing that really interests me is what mankind did with the big, big, big discoveries that have created our modern age.

You'll often hear the phrase "science doesn't know everything." Well, of course it doesn't know everything. But just because science doesn't know everything doesn't mean that it knows nothing.

A university is not, thank heavens, a place for vocational instruction, it has nothing to do with training for a working life and career, it is a place for education, something quite different.

The only people who are obsessed with food are anorexics and the morbidly obese. That, in erotic terms, is the Catholic church, in a nutshell.

You can never hope to recapture the first fine careless rapture as the poet put it, but it stays with you like a good acid trip.

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

I'm a bit of a coward, and lazy, oddly enough.

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.

You should give up.' 'Why?' 'For one thing, you'll live longer.' 'Oh, you don't live longer. It just seems longer.

Somehow, as a writer, you tend to use words to paper over structural cracks.

I expected the illegible and the deeply buried in me to be read as if carved on my forehead, just as I expected the obvious and the ill-concealed to be hidden from view.

The service took place on one of those afternoons that occur only in the past.

I gather a repulsive nobody writing in a paper no one of any decency would be seen dead with has written something loathesome and inhumane.

Life is sometimes novel-shaped, mocking the efforts of those authors who, in an effort to make their novels life-shaped, spurn the easy symmetry and cheap resonance of reality.

The other man's arse is always cleaner!

I now accept that it is looking increasingly likely that Tiger Woods is, in fact, straight.

We hold on STEVE's still smiling face as MICHAEL passes by. STEVE's eyes follow MICHAEL out of the room and then the smile disappears. It is replaced by a look of hunger and desolation.

I was born Mary Patterson, but then I married and naturally took my husband's name, so now I'm Neil Patterson.

I like to wake up each morning and not know what I think, that I may reinvent myself in some way.

Simon Gray, I decided when I first witnessed this frog into prince transformation, did not have a drinking problem. He had a drinking solution.

Sometimes there just isn't enough vomit in the world.

Enthusiats are used to being mocked, maligned and misunderstood. We don't really mind.

It was as if he grew his hair long and smoked cigarettes because he liked to, not because he liked being seen to. This was dangerously subversive.

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

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

Nobody seems to understand that in such matters the tact and sympathy should come from the one who is about to die, not the poor bugger who has to take the news.

Today it was commerce that Europe valued and it was the businessmen who, having exploited what the scientists and thechnologits had done for the world, now reaped the rewards.

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

A true thing, poorly expressed, is a lie.

I cannot bear natural light when I'm writing.

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

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

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

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

Mental health is one of the last great taboos.