Stephen Fry quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Stephen Fry on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

All we have to do is listen. The Good Lord gave us two ears and only one mouth, my dear white-headed mother used to say ...

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

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

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

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

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

Coming out as gay was an easy enough matter for me, since I worked in a profession where being gay had a long history of being accepted.

I like to think of myself at home in the armchair, writing, smoking and occasionally wandering down the shop.

Between funny and witty
Falls the shadow

Education is the sum of what students teach each other between lectures and seminars.

There is no right language or wrong language any more than there are right or wrong clothes.

The girl who played Gwendolen stood out like a good deed in a naughty world.

Nature admits no hierarchy of beauty or usefulness or importance.

I cannot bear natural light when I'm writing.

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

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

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

Over the years however, my nose grew and grew and it became apparent by the time I was fourteen that, like its owner, it was not growing straight.

The short answer to that is 'no.' The long answer is 'fuck no.

Nothing in this world is at it seems. Except, possibly, porridge.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

There is so much we can learn from TV. It's a window on the world.

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

Talent is inborn, but technique is learned.

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

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

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

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

Taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once. It is an insult to creation not to experience it fully. Temperance is wickedness.

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

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

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

In a dung heap, even a plastic bead can gleam like a sapphire.

Compromise is a stalling between two fools.

You either get Norfolk, with its wild roughness and uncultivated oddities, or you don't. It's not all soft and lovely. It doesn't ask to be loved.

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.

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

It's extremely unlucky to be superstitious, for no other reason than it is always unlucky to be colossally stupid.

I think faith in each other is much harder than faith in God.

It was a Tuesday in February. Many my life's most awful moments have taken place on Tuesdays. And what is February if not the Tuesday of the year?

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

If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people in the world?

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

A real education takes place, not in the lecture hall or library, but in the rooms of friends, with earnest frolic and happy disputation.

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

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

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

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

As absurd and dishonest as claiming that the trouble with computer games is that they stop people watching television.

Estate agents: like them or loathe them, you'd be mad not to loathe them.

wisdom is the ability to cope

But happiness is no respecter of persons.

Many people would no more think of entering journalism than the sewage business - which at least does us all some good.

The other man's arse is always cleaner!

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

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

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

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

Stop feeling sorry for yourself and you will be happy.

A point of view, a single way of thinking that encompasses all elements of a subject, allows essays more or less to write themselves.

It only takes a room of Americans for the English and Australians to realise how much we have in common.

A small proportion to be spent on production, the rest for wine and senseless riot.

Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.

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.

The sort of twee person who thinks swearing is in any way a sign of a lack of education or a lack of verbal interest is just a fucking lunatic.

I have Van Gogh's ear for music

When you've seen a nude infant doing a backward somersault you know why clothing exists.

Not one word of the following is true

A true thing, poorly expressed, is a lie.

How can I tell you what I think until I've heard what I'm going to say?

Is that where it all went wrong? Or is it where it all went right?

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

I don't watch television, I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.

It would be impossible to imagine going through life without swearing, and without enjoying swearing.

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

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

The Gay News critic wrote that I 'carried the lilt of the Irish without the brogue'.

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

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

Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.

Poetry is not made to be sucked up like a child's milkshake, it is much better sipped like a precious malt whisky.

You don't need a Harvard MBA to know that the bedroom and the boardroom are just two sides of the same ballgame.

You can't reason yourself back into cheerfulness any more than you can reason yourself into an extra six inches in height.

Little girls grow up to be women, little boys grow up to be little boys.

Generally, we admire the thing we are not.

Pomposity and indignation grow in old age, like nostril hairs and earlobes.

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

Hell, I am young. I am free. My teeth are clean. The sun shines. To hell with everything else

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.

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

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

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

And he, despite the gallons of free whisky on offer, was wishing himself violently elsewhere.