Quotes from Hugh Laurie

It is the middle of December now, and we are about to travel to Switzerland - where we plan to ski a little, relax a little, and shoot a Dutch politician a little.

Driving a motorcycle is like flying. All your senses are alive. Being House is like flying, too. He's free of the gravity of what people think.

People are more open about seeking help these days. They recognise the fact that the alternative to having a shrink is that you bore your friends stupid. So I figured that I might as well give someone 100 bucks an hour to hear my woes. At least someone can make a living out of listening to my tedious problems.

Keep on being yourself.

Newton's Third Law of Conversation, if it existed, would hold that every statement implies an equal and opposite statement. To say that I'd turned the offer down raised the possibility that I might not have done.

She turned towards me and narrowed her eyes...narrowed them horizontally, not vertically.

Just because it's a bad job doesn't mean I need to do it badly.

Humility was a cult in my family. I only got it out of my father by accident when he was very old that he had won an Olympic gold medal.

There's an undeniable pleasure in stepping into an open-top sports car driven by a beautiful woman. It feels like you're climbing into a metaphor.

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.

Having a vote once every four years is not the same thing as democracy.

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.

It's a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you're ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There's almost no such thing as ready. There's only now. And you may as well do it now. I mean, I say that confidently as if I'm about to go bungee jumping or something--I'm not. I'm not a crazed risk taker. But I do think that, generally speaking, now is as good a time as any.

Love is a word. A sound. Its association with a particular feeling is arbitrary, unmeasurable, and ultimately meaningless

I looked at her and sighed. In another world, I thought to myself, it might have worked. In another world, in another universe, in another time, as two quite different people, we really might have been able to put all of this behind us, take off to some sun-drenched Caribbean island, and have sex and pineapple juice, non-stop, for a year.

My dad gave me my first bike at 16. I soon fell off and was in a wheelchair for weeks. I haven't fallen since.

I never was someone who was at ease with happiness.

Pain is an event. It happens to you, and you deal with it in whatever way you can.

Humility was considered a great virtue in my family household. No show of complacency or self-satisfaction was ever tolerated. Patting yourself on the back was definitely not encouraged, and pleasure or pride would be punishable by death.

I suppose actors crave attention of some kind or they have suffered some form of arrested development and are still living in a sort of child's fantasy existence at some level in their psyche.