Quotes By Stephen Fry

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.

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.

But happiness is no respecter of persons.

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 watch television, I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

My father was all brain and little heart.

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 like to think of myself at home in the armchair, writing, smoking and occasionally wandering down the shop.

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.

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.

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

Somehow, as a writer, you tend to use words to paper over structural cracks.

Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.

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.

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.