Quotes from Stephen Fry

The English language is an arsenal of weapons; if you are going to brandish them without checking to see whether or no they are loaded you must expect to have them explode in your face from time to time. Poppycock means soft shit - from the Dutch, I need scarcely remind you, pappe kak.

Mental health is one of the last great taboos.

That's why I love talking and teaching: the act of reproducing ideas out loud reinforces them in the head. If, every time you read a complex book or idea, you had to explain it to someone else, you'd never forget it.

The puzzle that besets me is best expressed by the following statements. a: None of what follows ever happened b: All of what follows is entirely true

Priapus became the god of male genitalia and phalluses; he was especially prized by the Romans as the minor deity of the major boner.

Over the years however, my nose grew and grew and it became apparent by the time I was fourteen that, like its owner, it was not growing straight.

Remember," cautioned the centaur, "modesty. Observance of the gods. In a fight, do not do what you want to do, but what you judge your enemy least wants you to. You cannot control others if you cannot control yourself. Those who most understand their own limitations have the fewest.

The Gay News critic wrote that I 'carried the lilt of the Irish without the brogue'.

I know," said Helen. "Like all sacred and truly precious objects it is very plain. Only profane things are beautiful.

You will not find the truth but the truth will find you,' 'Seek not to know, but know to seek,' 'You don't make mistakes, mistakes make you

You can almost define a convict as one who lacks precisely the kind of wisdom and self-control necessary to derive long-term advantage from short-term discomfort.

Cambridge produces martyrs and Oxford burns them.

We all know the indignities to which enslaved humans will submit themselves in order to satisfy their addictions, whether for narcotics, alcohol, tobacco, sugar or sex. The desperation, savagery and degradation they publicly display make truffling pigs seem placid and composed by comparison.

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

as with almost all human practices, there are those who have the mysterious ability to raise the everyday and ordinary to the level of art.

Dieu n'est pas l'Auteur de l'Univers, c'est le scénariste de votre biopic.

You think you killed me, Hector,' Patroclus gasped. 'But it took the god Apollo to do that. Euphorbus was next. You, famous Hector, noble Hector, were just the third. All you did is finish me off. I die knowing that your fate will be settled by one greater than any … by my Achilles.

I hate it when people say swearing isn't necessary. Things not being necessary is what makes life interesting, the little extras in life.

But this is England, where the only crime is to be Found Out.

I like to think of this little [newspaper] column as a brassière, or do I mean brasserie? Brazier, possibly. All three! A column that lifts, separates, supports, serves excellent cappuccino and crackles merrily with sweet-smelling old chestnuts.

Mow the fuckers down.

It is simply a question of fulfilment. You feel perfectly alive and magnificently perfected by the knowledge that you are doing what you were put on earth to do.

I have always wanted to be able to express music and love and the things that I have felt in their own proper language – not like this, not like this with the procession of particular English verbs, adjectives, adverbs, nouns and prepositions that rolls before you now towards this full-stop and the coming paragraph of yet more words.

Sometimes political correctness exists more in the furious minds of its enemies than in reality, which gets n with compromise and common sense without too much hysteria.