Quotes By Stephen Fry

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.