Quotes from Stephen Fry

How dare you? How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault? It's not right. It's utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid god who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain.

If your mind and spirit are directed to your task, everything else will follow. Relax." "But focus," said Hermes. "Relaxation without focus leads to failure." "Focus without relaxation leads to failure just as surely," said Athena. "So concentrate . . ." said Perseus. "Exactly." ". . . but calmly?" "Concentrate calmly. You have it.

The tribal belonging, the sexual association, the sense of party – these are what popular music offer, and they have always been exclusion zones for me. Partly because of my musical constipation – can't dance, can't join in the chorus – partly because of my sense of physical self, feeling a fool, tall, uncoordinated and gangly.

I can play … I mean, as an effort of will I can sit down and learn a piece at the piano and reproduce it, so that those who hear will not necessarily move away with their hands clutched to their mouths, vomit leaking through fingers, blood dripping from ears.

It is the destiny of children of spirit to soar too close to the sun and fall no matter how many times they are warned of the danger. Some will make it, but many do not.

Blame, certainly, is a dish only edible when served fresh and warm. Old blames, grudges and scores congeal and curdle and cause the most terrible indigestion.

There are times when I'm doing QI and I'm going, 'Ha ha, yeah, yeah,' and inside I'm going 'I want to fucking die. I … want … to … fucking … die.' (Source : RHLSTP #18 - @87min32s)

You don't sit down and write a wish list about the person you are going to fall violently in love with. It just doesn't work like that.

I believe that poetry is a primal impulse within us all.

Matters of immense import may depend on such issues, but we can never do more than guess the outcomes of the roads we do not take.

The girl who played Gwendolen stood out like a good deed in a naughty world.

It can come a bit hard sometimes to see one's own unique, heroic life pinned so pitilessly to a wall. At other times it can endorse, affirm and save, but as I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters at all but me.

I hope you forgive the unedifying sight of my struggle to express some of the truths of my inner self and to measure the distance between the mask of security, ease, confidence and assurance I wear (so easily that its features often lift into a smirk that looks like complacency and smugness) and the real condition of anxiety, self-doubt, self-disgust and fear in which much of my life then and now is lived.

I cannot bear natural light when I'm writing.

Goodness me. You don't ask for the moon, do you?" "Oh, what a good idea! The moon. Yes, I'd love the moon, please. That will be all. I'll never ask for anything ever again ever.

The fool doth think he is wise, yet it is the wise man that knows himself to be the fool As You Like It, Act 5, Scene 1

Our language, tiger, our language: hundreds of thousands of available words, frillions of legitimate new ideas... And yet, oh, and yet, we, all of us, spend all our days saying to each other the same things time after weary time: I love you, Don't go in there, Get out, You have no right to say that, Stop it, Why should I, That hurt, Help, Marjorie is dead.

We have also an edition of The Trial, by the notorious Jew, Kafka. Berlin would appreciate it, I am thinking, if this too was added to the bonfire. Also the works of that decadent lesbian Bolshevik, Jane Austen.

I think I am angrier about that now than I ever was at the time. Pomposity and indignation grow in old age, like nostril hairs and earlobes.

The object of love should feel honoured or flattered, responsible in some way. Instead he felt insulted, degraded and revolted. More than that, he felt put upon.

Is that where it all went wrong? Or is it where it all went right?

If you wouldn't mind coming with us, sir? I am arresting you now and will shortly make a formal charge at the station.' I was so happy, so blissfully, radiantly, wildly happy that if I could have sung I would have sung. If I could have danced I would have danced. I was free. At last I was free. I was going on a journey now where every decision would be taken for me, every thought would be thought for me and every day planned for me. I was going back to school.

You choose to submit to it. Such is the paradox of living. We willingly accept that we have no will.

Language was all that I could do, but it never, I felt, came close to a dance or a song or a gliding through water. Language could serve as a weapon, a shield and a disguise, it had many strengths. It could bully, cajole, deceive, wheedle and intimidate. Sometimes it could even delight, amuse, charm, seduce and endear, but always as a solo turn, never a dance.