Best 336 quotes of Stephen Fry on MyQuotes

Stephen Fry

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

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

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    A cousin of mine who was a casualty surgeon in Manhattan tells me that he and his colleagues had a one-word nickname for bikers: Donors. Rather chilling.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    A cut glass English accent can fool unsuspecting Americans into detecting a brilliance that isn't there

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    A film star is a kind of public monument, and everyone's staring at them, and they've kind of got railings around them, and they're rather miserable most of the time.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    All the big words -virtue, justice, truth, ...- are dwarfed by the greatness of kindness

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    All the cold-reading clairvoyants and the nonsensical astrologers and absurd ESP merchants and other such people who talk about vibrations and energies.... God, if there's a word that drives me mad it's "energy" used in a nonsensical way-don't get me started!

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    Alternative medicine people call themselves "holistic" and say it's the "whole" approach. Well, if it's the whole approach, let it be the mind as well. Use logic, use sense, use the incredible five wits you were given by creation.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    A month's salary, deep regret, the telephone number of some foul rehab clinic and my lance was free.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    And of course you are mad, if by a madman we mean a mind that questions and rejects every civilized norm.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    And then I saw him and nothing was ever the same again. The sky was never the same colour, the moon never the same shape: the air never smelt the same, food never tasted the same. Every word I knew changed its meaning, everything that once was stable and firm became as insubstantial as a puff of wind, and every puff of wind became a solid thing I could feel and touch.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

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

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    A real education takes place, not in the lecture hall or library, but in the rooms of friends, with earnest frolic and happy disputation.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    ...as absurd and dishonest as claiming that the trouble with computer games is that they stop people watching television.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    As children everyone thinks their family is weird and they're upset by the weirdness of their own family.

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    As if a device can function if it has no style. As if a device can be called stylish that does not function superbly... yes, beauty matters. Boy, does it matter. It is not surface, it is not an extra, it is the thing itself.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    As I say I don't want to kill myself, I just wouldn't mind dying.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    Atheism comes into rather a bad press and I suppose I'd rather describe myself as a humanist... I don't believe in God. I don't believe there is a God.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    At John Schlesinger's funeral at a synagogue in St John's Wood some years ago the person I stood next to said to me encouragingly, 'Come on, Stephen - you're not singing. Have a go!' 'Believe me, Paul, you don't want me to,' I said. Besides, I was having a much better time listening to him. 'No. Go on!' So I joined in the chorus. 'You're right,' Paul McCartney conceded. 'You can't sing.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    At least 260 species of animal have been noted exhibiting homosexual behavior but only one species of animal ever, so far as we know, has exhibited homophobic behavior - and that's the human being.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    A university is not, thank heavens, a place for vocational instruction, it has nothing to do with training for a working life and career, it is a place for education, something quite different.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    Better sexy and racy Than sexist and racist

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    Between funny and witty Falls the shadow

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    But an Adrian also knew that an Adrian's lies were real: they were lived and felt and acted out as thoroughly as another man's truths - if other men had truths - and he believed it possible that this last lie might see him through to the grave.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    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'.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    Cheat? Good heavens, this is an amateur cricket match amongst leading prep schools, I'm an Englishman and a schoolmaster supposedly setting an example to his young charges. We are playing the most artistic and beautiful game ever devised. Of course I'll cunting well cheat. Now, give me my robe and put on my crown. I have immortal longings in me.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

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

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    Come back, and do that thing, be lovely to each-other.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    Coming out as gay was an easy enough matter for me, since I worked in a profession where being gay had a long history of being accepted.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    Cynical is the name we give those we fear may be laughing at us.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    Education is the sum of what students teach each other between lectures and seminars.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    Enthusiats are used to being mocked, maligned and misunderstood. We don't really mind.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    Estate agents. You can't live with them, you can't live with them. The first sign of these nasty purulent sores appeared round about 1894. With their jangling keys, nasty suits, revolting beards, moustaches and tinted spectacles, estate agents roam the land causing perturbation and despair. If you try and kill them, you're put in prison: if you try and talk to them, you vomit. There's only one thing worse than an estate agent but at least that can be safely lanced, drained and surgically dressed. Estate agents. Love them or loathe them, you'd be mad not to loathe them.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    Everything had been based on a kind of certainty, a sense of man at the center of things, a sense of order and hierarchy. And suddenly, almost simultaneously, extraordinary discoveries are made.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    Families where there is not much laughter I think are signs of some sort of dysfunctionality or sickness.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    First love is unrequited ultimately because it’s so huge.It’s such an act of giving and it requires so much back that it can never be given back. It’s like an atom bomb. It’s like… It’s all the energy of who you are and who you want to be and what you love and what you hope to be explodes. It is impossible for a single... human being to offer that back to you in a mutual way.

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    Great and good men and women stirred sugar into their coffee knowing that it had been picked by slaves. Kind, good ancestors of all of us never questioned hangings, burnings, tortures, inequality, suffering and injustice that today revolt us. If we dare to presume to damn them with our fleeting ideas of morality, then we risk damnation from our descendants for whatever it is that we are doing that future history will judge as intolerable and wicked: eating meat, driving cars, appearing on TV, visiting zoos, who knows?

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    Great writers, I discovered, were not to be bowed down before and worshipped, but embraced and befriended. Their names resounded through history not because they had massive brows and thought deep incomprehensible thoughts, but because they opened windows in the mind, they put their arms round you and showed you things you always knew but never dared to believe. Even if their names were terrifyingly foreign and intellectual sounding, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire or Cavafy, they turned out to be charming and wonderful and quite unalarming after all.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    Hell, I am young. I am free. My teeth are clean. The sun shines. To hell with everything else

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    Hey-ho, it's raining inside: it isn't my fault and there's nothing I can do about it, but sit it out. But the sun may well come out tomorrow and when it does, I shall take full advantage.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier. History is memory; we have to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite or a Chartist or even - if we dare, and we should dare - a Nazi. History is not abstraction, it is the enemy of abstraction.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    Homosexuals are not interested in making other people homosexuals. Homophobes are interested in making other people homophobes.

  • By Anonym
    Stephen Fry

    How dare you? How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault? It's not right, it's utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid god who creates a world that is so full of injustice and pain?