Quotes by Stephen Fry

And if the best you can do is quote the Bible in defence of your prejudice, then have the humility to be consistent. The same book that exhorts against the abomination of one man lying with another also contains exhortations against the eating of pork and shell-fish and against menstruating women daring to come near holy places. It’s no good functionalistically claiming that kosher diet had its local, meteorological purposes now defunct, or that the prejudice against ovulation can be dispensed with as superstition, the Bible that you bash us with tells you that much of what you do is unclean: don’t pick and choose with a Revealed Text — or if you do, pick and choose the good bits, the bits that say things like ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’, or ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’.

I was at a dinner party many years ago,sitting along from Tom Stoppard, who in those days smoked not just between courses,but between mouthfuls. An American woman watched in disbelief.And you so intelligent!Excuse me? said tomKnowing those things are going to kill you she said and still you do it.How differently I might behave Tom said, if immortality were an option

Seriousness is no more a guarantee of truth, insight, authenticity or probity, than humour is a guarantee of superficiality and stupidity.

Ive 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 Hordens animations.

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

I dont need you to remind me of my age. I have a bladder to do that for me.

Its 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 its 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 am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.

I think the fact that Im so well known to be gay makes it very difficult to have a convincing relationship with a woman on screen. It wouldnt be at all difficult for me to kiss a woman - Ill kiss a frog if you like.

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.

“I am a lover of truth, a worshiper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.”

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

“Those who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it.”

“People who can change and change again are so much more reliable and happier than those who can’t”

“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.”