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.
STEPHEN FRYYou can’t reason yourself back into cheerfulness any more than you can reason yourself into an extra six inches in height.
More Stephen Fry Quotes
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My father was all brain and little heart.
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It is a cliche that most cliches are true, but then like most cliches, that cliche is untrue.
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I don’t watch TV. I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.
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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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But happiness is no respecter of persons.
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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.
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Now, bipolar disorder, it goes on a spectrum. There’s very severe conditions of it and there are milder ones. I’m lucky enough that it’s reasonably mild in my case.
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My parents were marvelously educated people.
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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.
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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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My life, at least, is divided between writing and performing and mixtures of the two.
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I think we have all experienced passion that is not in any sense reasonable.
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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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Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the word’s full octave.
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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 feel I would love to close down for a number of years in some way and just be in the country making pork pies and chutneys and never have to poke my head out of the parapet.
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I like to think of myself at home in the armchair, writing, smoking and occasionally wandering down the shop.
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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.
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No, I love the idea that someone changes. As an actor it’s always the thing that you look for. He is someone who starts off bright, cheerful and confident and then has everything taken away from him. It’s a wonderful journey to take.
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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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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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I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.
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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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Moving from chair to chair, from coffee machine to coffee machine is the limit of my action in most films. But I enjoy being cast in them because I love watching them.
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You can act in five, six, or seven films in the time it takes to direct one film.
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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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