I shouldn’t be saying this – high treason, really – but I sometimes wonder if Americans aren’t fooled by our accent into detecting brilliance that may not really be there.
STEPHEN FRYHaving been an actor and a writer for so long – 20 years or so – I felt that it would be daft to go to one’s grave without having directed. It’s a natural extension of writing and acting, and so I knew it would happen one day.
More Stephen Fry Quotes
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To be human and to be adult means constantly to be in the grip of opposing emotions, to have daily to reconcile apparently conflicting tensions. I want this, but need that. I cherish this, but I adore its opposite too.
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When you get just a complete sense of blackness or void ahead of you, that somehow the future looks an impossible place to be, and the direction you are going seems to have no purpose, there is this word despair which is a very awful thing to feel.
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Somehow, as a writer, you tend to use words to paper over structural cracks.
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But happiness is no respecter of persons.
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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.
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There’s no doubt that I do have extremes of mood that are greater than just about anybody else I know.
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Having been an actor and a writer for so long – 20 years or so – I felt that it would be daft to go to one’s grave without having directed. It’s a natural extension of writing and acting, and so I knew it would happen one day.
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I don’t watch television, I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.
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I don’t believe there is a God. If I were to believe in a god, l would believe in gods.
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Philosophy is an odd thing. When we use the word in everyday speech, you know, you sometimes hear it hilariously.
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You can’t reason yourself back into cheerfulness any more than you can reason yourself into an extra six inches in height.
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Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the word’s full octave.
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It was extremely important to show that Wilde’s sexuality was not just some intellectual idea. It was real, and it was about the human body. To just have mentioned it and not shown it would have been, I think, peculiar and wrong.
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They are just 100 per cent bear, whereas human beings feel we’re not 100 per cent human, that we’re always letting ourselves down. We’re constantly striving towards something, to some fulfilment.
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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.
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I don’t watch TV. I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.
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My life, at least, is divided between writing and performing and mixtures of the two.
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But if one could go back in time, I’d love to have been directed by Howard Hawks, who’s one of my great heroes. One of the greatest directors there ever was. He directed probably one of the greatest westerns of all time in ‘Rio Bravo’.
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An original idea. That can’t be too hard. The library must be full of them.
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There is no particular Socratic or Dimechian or Kantian way to live your life. They don’t offer ethical codes and standards by which to live your life.
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Happiness is no respecter of persons.
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I’ve never had any illusions about being a lead actor in films, because lead actors have to be of a certain kind. Apart from the beauty of looks and figure, which I cannot claim to have, there’s just a particular kind of ordinary-Joe quality that a film star needs to have.
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Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.
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Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.
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I think we have all experienced passion that is not in any sense reasonable.
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Personally, I’d never seen a graphic novel. I knew they existed because friends of mine like Jonathan Ross collect them and some very literate and intelligent people really rate the graphic novel as a form.
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