Stephen Fry citations

Page 2

“How to seperate the humiliation from the loss, that's the catch. You can never be sure if what tortures you is the pain of being without someone you love or the embarrassment of admitting that you have been rejected.”

“Self-consciousness, that's what it is. Always my abiding vice. I keep seeing myself. Me watching myself watching others watch me. How do you lose that? What's the trick?”

“there is no reason why anyone should understand how it works… and of course no reason why anyone should care … unless you are curious, in which case I love you, for curiosity about the world and all its corners is a beautiful thing.”

“I have a dark and dreadful secret. I write poetry… I believe poetry is a primal impulse within all of us. I believe we are all capable of it and furthermore that a small, often ignored corner of us positively yearns to try it.”

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

“Compromise is a stalling between two fools.”

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

“Sex without smiling is as sickly and as base as vodka and tonic without ice.”

“I suppose this was the first time I had ever felt an urge not to be. Never an urge to die, far less an urge to put an end to myself - simply an urge not to be. This disgusting, hostile and unlovely world was not made for me, nor I for it.”

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will always hurt me.”

“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".”

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

“I'm fat because I'm greedy, and if my mind is fat it's because I'm curious.”

“Old professors never die, they just lose their faculties.”

“Literary studies were no more than a series of autopsies performed by heartless technicians. Worse than autopsies: biopsies. Vivisection. Even movies, which I love more than anything, more than life itself, they even do it with movies these days.”

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

“We gave you a perfectly good language and you f***ed up.”

“My first meeting with you only confirmed what I first suspected. You are a fraud, a charlatan and a shyster. My favourite kind of person, in fact.”

“I have Van Gogh's ear for music”

“Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the word's full octave”

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

“Life is sometimes novel-shaped, mocking the efforts of those authors who, in an effort to make their novels life-shaped, spurn the easy symmetry and cheap resonance of reality.”

“Life, that can shower you with so much splendour, is unremittingly cruel to those who have given up.”

“To me, reason is as spiritual as anything else, the beauty of reason seems to me indelible and ineffable and numinous… the spirit is after all the same word we use to describe… essence”

“It was as if he grew his hair long and smoked cigarettes because he liked to, not because he liked being seen to. This was dangerously subversive.”

“You'll often hear the phrase "science doesn't know everything." Well, of course it doesn't know everything. But just because science doesn't know everything doesn't mean that it knows nothing.”

“Literature is the only access to truth we have on this planet.”

“Part of life is learning what to be ashamed of and what to be proud of.”

“In a dung heap, even a plastic bead can gleam like a sapphire.”