Stephen Fry Quotes & Sayings

I may have looked happy but inside I was hopelessly depressed. — Stephen Fry

The part of [Oscar] Wilde was exceptionally important to me; the man, his achievements, his wisdom, but his downfall, his disgrace and the tragic and bitter end to it have always fascinated, appalled and attracted me since childhood. It was he who first in some measure vindicated my sexuality. — Stephen Fry

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

Knowing what I now know I would never have done anything so fatuous; but then I never would have known what I know now had I not. — Stephen Fry

If you know someone who's depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn't a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather.
Try to understand the blackness, lethargy, hopelessness, and loneliness they're going through. Be there for them when they come through the other side. It's hard to be a friend to someone who's depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do. — Stephen Fry

Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise. — Stephen Fry

My mother has an absolute passion for sour fruit and can strip a gooseberry bush quicker than a priest can strip a choirboy. — Stephen Fry

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. — Stephen Fry

Things are always worse in the steady watches of the night. — Stephen Fry

That's alright," said Hugo. "I've got some wine"
Which was about all he seemed to have. He poured out two mugfuls.
"Very nice," said Adrian, sipping appreciatively. "I wonder how they got the cat to sit on the bottle."
"It's cheap, that's the main thing. — Stephen Fry

We have also an edition of The Trial, by the notorious Jew, Kafka. Berlin would appreciate it, I am thinking, if this too was added to the bonfire. Also the works of that decadent lesbian Bolshevik, Jane Austen. — Stephen Fry

He knew he could never jingle change in his pocket or park his car like a confident adult, he was the Adrian he had always been, casting a guilty look over a furtive shoulder, living in eternal dread of a grown-up striding forward to clip his ear.
But there again, when he sipped at the whiskey his eyes failed to water and his throat forgot to burn. The body shamelessly welcomed what once it would have rejected. At breakfast he demanded not Ricicles and chocolate spread, but coffee and unbuttered toast. And if the coffee was sugared he leapt from it like a colt from an electric fence. He ate the crust and left the filling, guzzled the olives and spurned the cherries. Yet inside he remained the same Adrian who fought down the urge to stand and shout 'Bullocks' during church services, smelt his own farts and wasted hours skimming through National Geographic on the off-chance of seeing a few naked bodies. — Stephen Fry

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

My life, at least, is divided between writing and performing and mixtures of the two. — Stephen Fry

The alarm in the morning? Well, I have an old tape of Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in a perfectly transcendent version in Shubert's seventh symphony. And I've rigged it up so that at exactly 7:30 every morning it falls from the ceiling onto my face. — Stephen Fry

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

All the cold-reading clairvoyants and the nonsensical astrologers and absurd ESP merchants and other such people who talk about vibrations and energies ... God, if there's a word that drives me mad it's "energy" used in a nonsensical way-don't get me started! — Stephen Fry

The puzzle that besets me is best expressed by the following statements. a: None of what follows ever happened b: All of what follows is entirely true — Stephen Fry

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

Is that where it all went wrong? Or is it where it all went right? — Stephen Fry

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. — Stephen Fry

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

The point is that a pleasure which leaves you satisfied stops being a pleasure the moment it has been enjoyed. You are now sated, there is nothing more to be got from it. Sex and food are pleasures of this kind. What follows? A touch of afterglow if you are that sort of person, but mostly guilt, flatulence and self-disgust. — Stephen Fry

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. — Stephen Fry

How dare you? How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that's not our fault? It's not right. It's utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid god who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain? — Stephen Fry

We all know that drugs, alcohol and tobacco are Bad, but work, we are brought up to believe, is Good. As a result the world is full of families who are angry at being abandoned and breadwinners who are even more angry because their hours of labour are not sufficiently appreciated. — Stephen Fry

It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing - they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me. — Stephen Fry

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

Everyone else new you ever meet, and this continues through life, is stronger than you are, knows the system better and sees right through to the back of your brain and finds what they see to be wholly inadequate. Everyone you encounter carries, as it were, a huge club behind their back, while all you hold behind yours is a weedy cotton-bud. — Stephen Fry

If you spend your life on a moral hill-top, you see nothing but the mud below. If, like me, you live in the mud itself, you get a damned good view of clear blue sky and clean green hills above. There's none so evil-minded as those with a moral mission, and none so pure in heart as the depraved. — Stephen Fry

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

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

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

I want you to know that you are not alone in your being alone. — Stephen Fry

I suppose people were trying to be kind and protect me from the humiliation of discovering that, even after an operation to straighten my ridiculous nose, I would still look a mess. The trauma of finding out that a straight-nosed Stephen looked every bit as unappetising as a bent-nosed Stephen might have tipped me completely over the edge. — Stephen Fry

My parents were marvelously educated people. — Stephen Fry

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

There comes a time when the blankness of the future is just so extreme, it's like such a black wall of nothingness. Not of bad things like a cave full of monsters and so, you're afraid of entering it. It's just nothingness, the void, emptiness and it is just horrible. It's like contemplating a future-less future and so you just want to step out of it. The monstrosity of being alive overwhelms you. — Stephen Fry

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

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

He had read and absorbed more than he could understand, so he lived by pastiche and pretence. — Stephen Fry

Think springs of water. Think wells and spas and sources. Well-springs in the widest and loveliest sense. Jerusalem, for instance, is a spring of religiosity. One small town in the desert, but the source of the world's three most powerful faiths. It is the capital of Judaism, the scene of Christ's crucifixion and the place from which Mohammed ascended into heaven. Religion seems to bubble from its sands. — Stephen Fry

[On libraries] What's great about them is that anybody can go into them and find a book and borrow it free of charge and read it. They don't have to steal it from a bookshop ... You know when you're young, you're growing up, they're almost sexually exciting places because books are powerhouses of knowledge, and therefore they're kind of slightly dark and dangerous. You see books that kind of make you go 'Oh! — Stephen Fry

My first words, as I was being born [ ... ] I looked up at my mother and said, 'that's the last time I'm going up one of those. — Stephen Fry

It is, I know, for I have experienced it perhaps twice in my life, an awful privilege to be too much loved and perhaps the kindest thing I ever did in my life was never to let Matthew know to what degree he had destroyed my peace and my happiness. — Stephen Fry

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

I cannot bear natural light when I'm writing. — Stephen Fry

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. — Stephen Fry

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

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? — Stephen Fry

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

There is no reason why anyone should understand how it works ... and of course no reason why anyone should care ... unless you are curious, in which case I love you, for curiosity about the world and all its corners is a beautiful thing. — Stephen Fry

The British are like that, especially the middle class Radio 4 audience: a young snappy, angry person annoys them, and they shout at the radio for him to show some respect and get the spiritual and intellectual equivalent of a haircut. But let the same sentiments exactly, word for word, be uttered in high academic tones, as if by a compound of G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and Anthony Quinton, and they will roll onto their tummies and purr. — Stephen Fry

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

As I say I don't want to kill myself, I just wouldn't mind dying. — Stephen Fry

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. — Stephen Fry

People who can change and change again are so much more reliable and happier than those who can't — Stephen Fry

Nature admits no hierarchy of beauty or usefulness or importance. — Stephen Fry

For some reason the word "chronic" often has to be explained. It does not mean severe, though many chronic conditions can be exceptionally serious and indeed life-threatening. No, "chronic" means persistent over time, enduring, constant. Diabetes is a chronic condition, but measles is not. With measles, you contract it and then it is gone. It can sometimes be fatal, but is never chronic. Manic depression, in other words, is something you have to learn to live with. There are therapies which may help some people to function and function for the most part happily and well. Sometimes a talking therapy, sometimes pharmaceutical intervention helps. — Stephen Fry

I went to Cambridge and thought I would stay there. I thought I would quietly grow tweed in a corner somewhere and become a Don or something. — Stephen Fry

My father was all brain and little heart. — Stephen Fry

Other people's tears were more than Adrian could cope with. Did you put an arm round them? Did you pretend not to notice? — Stephen Fry

Sex does not enrich or deepen a relationship, it permanently cheapens and destabilises one. Everyone I know who is unfortunate enough to have a sex-mate, joy-partner, bed-friend, love-chum, call them what you will finds that
after a week or two of long blissful afternoons of making the beast with two backs, or the beast with one back and a funny shaped middle or the beast with legs splayed in the air and arms gripping the sides of the mattress
the day dawns when Partner A is keen for more swinking, grinding, and sweating and Partner B would rather turn over and catch up with Jeeves and Bertie. — Stephen Fry

Naturally I've known girlies form an attachment to the younger male before now, but in the tennis score of the bedroom most girls in my experience would rather Love Thirty or Love Forty than Love Fifteen. Men, of course, are a whole other issue; they start at Love All and stay there until they're dragged from the court — Stephen Fry

Could do better' is a meaningless conclusion. 'Could be happier' is the only one that counts. — Stephen Fry

When you do not understand how something works it is perhaps natural to question and to doubt. — Stephen Fry

The fool doth think he is wise, yet it is the wise man that knows himself to be the fool As You Like It, Act 5, Scene 1 — Stephen Fry

I also knew that he was the kind of anile little runt who, in foyers and theatre bars the West End over, can be heard bleating into their gin and tonics, "I go to the theatre to be entertained. — Stephen Fry

I think we have all experienced passion that is not in any sense reasonable. — Stephen Fry

People still don't get how astounding Darwinism is. People think what shocked everybody was that Charles Darwin seemed to be saying we had descended from apes. — Stephen Fry

Like a Frenchman, far from home, catching a whiff of Gauloise. — Stephen Fry

To me, reason is as spiritual as anything else, the beauty of reason seems to me indelible and ineffable and numinous ... the spirit is after all the same word we use to describe ... essence — Stephen Fry

Few people in one's life ever go quite away. They turn up again like characters in a Simon Raven novel. It is as if Fate is a movie producer who cannot afford to keep introducing new characters into the script but must get as many scenes out of every actor as possible. — Stephen Fry

You think homosexuality is disgusting? Then, it follows, it follows as the night the day, that you find sex disgusting, for there is nothing done between two men or two women that is, by any objective standard, different from that which is done between a man and a woman. — Stephen Fry

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

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

The other man's arse is always cleaner! — Stephen Fry

Unlike an envied and admirable few, I separate my friends and almost never dare mingle one group with another. When I do, it is usually a social disaster, like mixing drinks. I love good beer and I love good wine, but you cannot drink both on the same evening without suffering. I love the friends with whom I play or once daily played snooker and tooted quantities of high-grade pulverized Andean flake; I love the friends with whom I dine at preposterously expensive restaurants; I love the friends with whom I'm film-making or mincing on the stage. I love and value them all equally and don't think of them as stratified or in tiers, one group in some way higher or more important than the rest, but the thought of introducing them to each other makes me shiver and shudder with cringing embarrassment. — Stephen Fry

Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the word's full octave — Stephen Fry

Thank you for your input; I can tell you are struggling towards being interesting. — Stephen Fry

Nudity is a deep worry if you have a body like a bin bag full of yoghurt, which I have. — Stephen Fry

The people I know who SWEAR THE MOST tend to have the widest vocabularies. — Stephen Fry

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

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

No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time. — Stephen Fry

Like vichyssoise, revenge is a dish best served cold. — Stephen Fry

Princess Diana holds in the threshold for a second longer, checks over her shoulder that her Prince is out of earshot and whispers softly in my ear, 'Sorry to leave early, though secretly I'm quite glad. It's Spitting Image tonight, and I want to watch it in my room. They hate it of course. I absolutely adore it. — Stephen Fry

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

Anger fed him and clothed him and he owed it much. — Stephen Fry

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. — Stephen Fry

They had been there. I had seen my mother's anxious face, desperate to catch my eye and give me a warm smile. I had tried to smile back, but I had not known how. That old curse again. How to smile. If I smiled too broadly it might look like triumphalism; if I smiled too weakly it might look like a feeble bid for sympathy. If I smiled somewhere in between it would, I knew, look, as always, like plain smugness. Somehow I managed to bare my teeth in a manner that expressed, I hope, sorrow, gratitude, determination, shame, remorse and resolve. — Stephen Fry

One of the most unattractive human traits, and so easy to fall into, is resentment at the sudden shared popularity of a previously private pleasure. Which of us hasn't been annoyed when a band, writer, artist or television series that had been a minority interest of ours has suddenly achieved mainstream popularity? When it was at a cult level we moaned at the philistinism of a world that didn't appreciate it, and now that they do appreciate it we're all resentful and dog-in-the-manger about it. — Stephen Fry

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. — Stephen Fry

The class erupted into noisy laughter and, since I was always, and have always been, determined that merriment should never be seen to be at my expense, I joined in and accepted my star with as much pleased dignity as I could muster. — Stephen Fry

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

Stop wanting wealth and fame and start wanting instead to do something well about which you are passionate — Stephen Fry

I am magnificently prepared for the long littleness of life. There is diddley-squat for me to look forward to. Zilch, zero, zip-all, sweet lipperty-pipperty nothing. The only thought that will give me the energy to carry on is that someone has a life which would be diminished by my departure from it. — Stephen Fry

When push-off comes to shove-off, a man must have a reason to get out of bed in the mornings, something more than the threat of bedsores, at any rate. — Stephen Fry

What makes a good family? Well, I suppose obviously love. Love lubricated often I think by humor. I think a family that can laugh at each other and tease themselves and who are able to be jolly with each other I think is the key. — Stephen Fry

Everyone has it in them to express themselves that fundamental thing that they know they are inside. That rather beautiful afraid person. Which might get translated into aggression, or silence, or shyness, or all kinds of other things. But inside we know that we are huggable and lovable, and we want to love and be loved. That person is yearning for fulfillment. To be the person they know they can be and that's a constant journey; that's a process. It's not acquiring about this thing and then that thing, getting to this place, learning this technique, and finding out how this works. It's about the fact that other people are always more interesting than oneself. Let's forget what successful people have in common, if there's a thing unsuccessful people have in common it's that they talk about themselves all the time. — Stephen Fry