Quotes by Hugh Laurie

“To me, hes a hero, ... Hes not polite. Hes not someone you want to take home to meet your mother, necessarily. This is a guy in search of truth. Incidentally, that truth one day could save your life or the life of someone you love. Thats a heroic thing.”

“I am terribly conscious of the fact that the world doesnt need any more actors. There are so many brilliant actors around that one more twit like me joining the back of the queue seems completely unnecessary.”

“How did I do that? Its a long story. You know, kids, boys, explosive things. It will happen.”

“He was a very gentle soul and, I think, a very good doctor. And Im probably being paid more to become a fake version of my own father.”

“Really? I suppose reading the confidential psychiatric file of his ex-girlfriend.”

“People assume that Im very highly trained, that I studied and did years and years of Shakespeare. I have no training whatsoever and Ive only done one Shakespeare play at university. If people want to believe that, Im happy to go along with it.”

“Perfection is intensely annoying. Audiences were ready for a character who didnt obey the usual pieties of modern life.”

“So he came back at 40 ... with a science degree, thinking, `Well, what am I going to do now? and with two kids, he enrolled in medical school with a lot of 19-year-olds, ... an amazing thing.”

“He worked as a doctor for 30 years and as far as I know, never stood up in front of millions of people and got a gold shiny thing for it, which seems ridiculous someone who pretends to do that should be honored and recognized, but its a crazy world, you know?”

“They, all of them, work incredibly hard to make me seem clever and heroic, neither of which I am.”

I would cling to unhappiness because it was a known, familiar state. When I was happier, it was because I knew I was on my way back to misery. Ive never been convinced that happiness is the object of the game. Im wary of happiness.

I was shown into a room. A red room. Red wallpaper, red curtains, red carpet. They said it was a sitting-room, but I don’t know why they’d decided to confine its purpose just to sitting. Obviously, sitting was one of the things you could do in a room this size; but you could also stage operas, hold cycling races, and have an absolutely cracking game of frisbee, all at the same time, without having to move any of the furniture.It could rain in a room this big.

This was the tricky bit. The really tricky bit, trickiness cubed.

We want different things. Men want to have sex with a woman. Then they want to have sex with another woman. And then another. Then they want to eat cornflakes and sleep for a while, and then they want to have sex with another woman, and another, until they die. Women,’ and I thought I’d better pick my words carefully when describing a gender I didn’t belong to, ‘want a relationship. They may not get it, or they may sleep with a lot of men before they do get it, but ultimately that’s what they want. That’s the goal. Men do not have goals. Natural ones. So they invent them, and put them at either end of a football pitch. And then they invent football. Or they pick fights, or try and get rich, or start wars, or come up with any number of daft bloody things to make up for the fact that they have no real goals.’‘Bollocks,’ said Ronnie.‘That, of course, is the other main difference.

It was the sheer variety of the pain that stopped me from crying out. It came from so many places, spoke so many languages, wore so many dazzling varieties of ethnic costume, that for a full fifteen seconds I could only hang my jaw in amazement.

The sexual mechanisms of the two genders are just not compatible, that’s the horrible truth of it. (...)This is a truth we dare not acknowledge these days - because sameness is our religion and heretics are no more welcome now than they ever were - but I’m going to acknowledge it, because I’ve always felt that humility before the facts is the only thing that keeps a rational man together. Be humble in the face of facts, and proud in the face of opinions, as George Bernard Shaw once said. He didn’t, actually. I just wanted to put some authority behind this observation of mine, because I know you’re not going to like it.

Normally, words are sentfrom the brain towards the mouth, and somewhere along the line you take a moment to checkthem, see that they are actually the ones you ordered and that they’re nicely wrapped, beforeyou bundle them on their way towards your palate and out into the fresh air.But when you’re caught up in the flow of things, the checking part of your mind can falldown on the job.

I started to think of friends I could lean on for some help, but, as always happened when I attempted this kind of social audit, I realised that far too many of them were abroad, dead, married to people who disapproved of me, or werent really my friends, now that I came to think of it.

Its a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until youre ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now. And you may as well as do it now. Generally speaking, now is as good a time as any.

I once met an RAF pilot who told me of what he called a bird strike. This, rather unfairly in my view, made it sound as if it was the birds fault; as if the little feathered chap had deliberately tried to head-butt twenty tons of metal travelling in the opposite direction at just under the speed of sound, out of spite.