Stephen Fry Quotes

125 Sourced Quotes

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

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
I have to mime at parties when everyone sings Happy Birthday... mime or mumble and rumble and growl and grunt so deep that only moles, manta rays and mushrooms can hear me.

Stephen Fry
We are more afraid of being pretentious than of being dishonest.

Stephen Fry
My vocal cords are made of tweed. I give off an air of Oxford donnishness and old BBC wirelesses.

Stephen Fry
I remember nothing of this, no ambulance rides, nothing. Nothing between switching out the bedside lamp and the sudden indignity of rebirth: the slaps, the brightness, the tubing, the speed, the urgent insistence that I be choked back into breathing life. I have felt so sorry for babies ever since.

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
If asked, I would have told you that I was happy. I was happy. I was content, which is to happy what Pavillon Rouge is to Château Margaux, I suppose, but which will have to do for most of us.

Stephen Fry
Well, my interpretation is no more valid than anyone else's, but I would say in terms of medicine, people want to take control of their own lives, and ironically they seem to think that they are taking control of their lives more by using so-called complementary or alternative medicines than by using orthodox medicine. In other words, they think it's a statement of originality and individuality. To you and me it seems self-evidently ridiculous, this homeopathic medicine. It is so preposterous, and yet some people I know and respect insist on believing it.

Stephen Fry
I expected the illegible and the deeply buried in me to be read as if carved on my forehead, just as I expected the obvious and the ill-concealed to be hidden from view.

Stephen Fry
I was called by my agent, who said "Would you like to record a track with Kate Bush?" To which there is only F-ing one possible answer. Unless its me singing. I said, "She does know I can't sing?" "No-no-no, it would be voicing, saying words for snow. … I still can't believe it says "Kate Bush-Stephen Fry."

Stephen Fry
The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.

Stephen Fry
They used to say that Cambridge was the first stopping place for the wind that swept down from the Urals: in the thirties that was as true of the politics as the weather.

Stephen Fry
I like words — strike that I love words — and while I am fond of the condensed and economical use of them in poetry, in song lyrics, in Twitter, in good journalism and smart advertising, I love the luxuriant profusion and mad scatter of them too.

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

Stephen Fry
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.

Stephen Fry
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.

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
It is a little theory of mine that has much exercised my mind lately, that most of the problems of this silly and delightful world derive from our apologising for those things which we ought not to apologise for, and failing to apologise for those things for which apology is necessary.

Stephen Fry
The church has no power over our lives any more, which is something of a blessing for those who do not enjoy red-hot pokers or iron thumb-screws...

Stephen Fry
I knew I couldn't believe in God, because I was fundamentally Hellenic in my outlook.

Stephen Fry
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...

Stephen Fry
As humourless a lump of dough as ever held a torchlight vigil outside the South African Embassy or stuck an AIDS awareness ribbon on an unwilling first-nighter.

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

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
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
A book is judged, not by its reference to life, but by its reference to other books.

Stephen Fry
The performance of buggery is no more inevitable a part of homosexuality than an orange syllabub is an inevitable part of a dinner: some may clamour for it and instantly demand a second helping, some are not interested, some decide they will try it once and then instantly vomit.

Stephen Fry
The stranger might laugh and seem to enjoy the writing, but you hug to yourself the thought that they didn't quite understand its force and quality the way you do - just as your friends (thank heavens) don't also fall in love with the person you are going on and on about to them.

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