Stephen Fry Quotes

Stephen Fry Quotes

Stop feeling sorry for yourself and you will be happy.

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

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

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

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.

Compromise is a stalling between two fools.

It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe, but not worth bothering with.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

...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.

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

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

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.

lectures broke into one's day and were clearly a terrible waste of time, necessary no doubt if you were reading law or medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English, the natural thing to do was talk a lot, listen to music, drink coffee and wine, read books, and go to plays, perhaps be in plays…

What the eye doesn’t see the stomach doesn’t heave over.

The Guti were a band of mountain barbarians. It's always the way, isn't it? Everything is blamed on 'the barbarians

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

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?

Nature admits no hierarchy of beauty or usefulness or importance.

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".

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.

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

You are who you are when nobody's watching.

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

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

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.

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