Quotes By Stephen Fry

Because, let's face it, I do not get offered the parts that Brad Pitt has just turned down.

Happiness is no respecter of persons.

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

I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.

Old Professors never die, they just lose their faculties.

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

Oh, it takes a lot for me to walk out of a film.

It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh... Robert Schumann has been mentioned... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath... some of them with rather grim ends.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm a bit of a coward, and lazy, oddly enough.

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'.

I'd probably want to teach at university, because children would drive me insane. I suspect it would be English literature, Shakespeare and so forth. I've always been deeply, deeply in love with that kind of thing.

But happiness is no respecter of persons.

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

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.

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

Generally, we admire the thing we are not.

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

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.

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.

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

That one can love another of the same gender, that is what the homophobe really cannot stand.

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.

The point about manic depression or bipolar disorder, as it's now more commonly called, is that it's about mood swings. So, you have an elevated mood. When people think of manic depression, they only hear the word depression. They think one's a depressive. The point is, one's a manic-depressive.

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

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