Quotes By Stephen Fry

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I think my view is that whenever you project into the future you're never likely to be accurate in the details, or the paraphernalia and style. It's in the spirit of it.

It is a cliche that most cliches are true, but then like most cliches, that cliche is untrue.

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.

Happiness is no respecter of persons.

My father was all brain and little heart.

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

I think the fact that I'm so well known to be gay makes it very difficult to have a convincing relationship with a woman on screen. It wouldn't be at all difficult for me to kiss a woman - I'll kiss a frog if you like.

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.

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

I have pushed the boat out as far as I should in terms of taking on too many things. I'm getting older and I just could not take it any more. I am now monitoring myself very closely and I'm just trying not to get into that sort of state again.

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

Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.

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.

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.

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.

I get an urge, like a pregnant elephant, to go away and give birth to a book.

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

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

But happiness is no respecter of persons.

There's no doubt that I do have extremes of mood that are greater than just about anybody else I know.

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

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.