Quotes by Stephen Fry

...Catholic versus Protestant, essentially. Its that kind of fight. ... And it goes on to this day. Will we never learn? Who knows? Religion. Shit it.

Im fat because Im greedy, and if my mind is fat its because Im curious.

Entirely in accordance with what education is supposed to be. Education is the sum of what students teach each other in between lectures and seminars. You sit in each others rooms and drink coffee - I suppose it would be vodka and Red Bull now - you share enthusiasms, you talk a lot of wank about politics, religion, art and the cosmos and then you go to bed, alone or together according to taste. I mean, how else do you learn anything, how else do you take your mind for a walk?

Wine can be a better teacher than ink, and banter is often better than books

Today it was commerce that Europe valued and it was the businessmen who, having exploited what the scientists and thechnologits had done for the world, now reaped the rewards.

You are aware that what they do, they do for the world, and the results are, of course, magnificent. But when you . . . read Douglas Adams. . . you feel you are, perhaps, the only person in the world who really gets them. Just about everybody else admires them, of course, but no one really connects with them in the way you do . . . It’s like falling in love. When an especially peachy Adams’ turn of phrase or epithet enters the eye and penetrates the brain, you want to tap the shoulder of the nearest stranger and share it. The stranger might laugh and seem to enjoy the writing, but you hug to yourself the thought that they didn’t quite understand its force and quality the way you do, just as your friends, thank heavens, don’t also fall in love with the person you are going on and on about to them.

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

You are who you are when nobodys watching.

Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, its the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine on a pair of boxer shorts, its a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, the warm wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot.

The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane. Each sentence we produce, whether we know it or not, is a mongrel mouthful of Chaucerian, Shakespearean, Miltonic, Johnsonian, Dickensian and American. Military, naval, legal, corporate, criminal, jazz, rap and ghetto discourses are mingled at every turn. The French language, like Paris, has attempted, through its Academy, to retain its purity, to fight the advancing tides of Franglais and international prefabrication. English, by comparison, is a shameless whore.

Cheat? Good heavens, this is an amateur cricket match amongst leading prep schools, Im 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 Ill cunting well cheat. Now, give me my robe and put on my crown. I have immortal longings in me.

lectures broke into ones day and were clearly a terrible waste of time, necessary no doubt if you were reading law or medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English, the natural thing to do was talk a lot, listen to music, drink coffee and wine, read books, and go to plays, perhaps be in plays…

Its now very common to hear people say, Im rather offended by that. As if that gives them certain rights. Its actually nothing more... than a whine. I find that offensive. It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. I am offended by that. Well, so fucking

But one day he said to me:‘I’ve got it now. It’s reading isn’t it?’‘I’m sorry?’‘You read a lot, don’t you? That’s where it all comes from. Reading. Yeah, reading.’The next time I saw him he had a Herman Hesse novel in his hands. I never saw him again without a book somewhere on his person. When I heard, some years later, that he had got into Cambridge I thought to myself, I know how that happened. He decided one day to read.

Once, in his first term, Cartwright had been bold enough to ask him why he was clever, what exercises he did to keep his brain fit. Healey had laughed.Its memory, Cartwright, old dear. Memory, the mother of the Muses... at least thats what thingummy said.

The biggest challenge facing the great teachers and communicators of history is not to teach history itself, nor even the lessons of history, but why history matters. How to ignite the first spark of the will othe wisp, the Jack olantern, the ignis fatuus [foolish fire] beloved of poets, which lights up one source of history and then another, zigzagging across the marsh, connecting and linking and writing bright words across the dark face of the present. Theres no phrase I can come up that will encapsulate in a winning sound-bite why history matters. We know that history matters, we know that it is thrilling, absorbing, fascinating, delightful and infuriating, that it is life. Yet I cant help wondering if its a bit like being a Wagnerite; you just have to get used to the fact that some people are never going to listen.

Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise.

The alarm in the morning? Well, I have an old tape of Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in a perfectly transcendent version in Shuberts seventh symphony. And Ive rigged it up so that at exactly 7:30 every morning it falls from the ceiling onto my face.

Music is everything and nothing. It is useless and no limit can be set on its use. Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could devise. Music makes me write this sort of maundering adolescent nonsense without embarrassment. Music is in fact the dogs bollocks. Nothing else comes close.

There is simply no limit to the tyrannical snobbery that otherwise decent people can descend into when it comes to music.