Quotes from Stephen Fry

I've always believed it right for young people to drink. Not to be alcoholic of course, that is a passive state of being, not a positive action. But it is good to drink to excess.

Thalia The finest, funniest, friendliest Muse of all, THALIA supervised the comic arts and idyllic poetry. Her name derives from the Greek verb for 'to flourish'.fn5 Like her tragic counterpart Melpomene she sports actors' boots and a mask (hers being the cheerful smiling one of course), but she is wreathed in ivy and carries a bugle and a trumpet.

He's your enemy, Donald!' 'He most certainly is not,' said Trefusis. 'Not unless I say so. He may dearly want to be my enemy, he may beg on bended knee for open hostility of the most violent kind, but it takes two to tangle. I choose my own enemies.

Pomposity and indignation grow in old age, like nostril hairs and earlobes.

Thanatos, the grim, forbidding figure of Death.

None of this is important in itself, but I feel somewhere that it has a lot to do with why I have always felt separate, why I have always felt unable to join in, to let go, to become part of the tribe, why I have always sniped or joked from the sidelines, why I have never, ever, lost my overwhelmingly self-conscious self-consciousness.

Don't go looking for something psychological that isn't there. I have a bath after any kind of strenuous exercise. It doesn't mean I feel dirty," though he did, "it doesn't mean I'm trying to wash you out of my life," though he was, "it doesn't mean guilt, shame, repentance or anything like that," though it did. "It just means I want a bath.

My lifelong battle to control cabling began at this time. All the cables I have ever owned would stretch to the moon and back. Except they would not be able to because they would fail to connect up with each other. Anyone can write a story in which humans can teleport, travel in time and make themselves invisible A future in which there are cable compatibility standards, that would be real science fiction.

To use a distinction made by E. M. Forster when talking about people in novels, the world now went from flat characters to rounded characters—to the development of personalities whose actions could surprise. The fun began.

I have always disbelieved that Sicilian saying about revenge being a dish best served cold. I feel that – don't you? – when I see blinking, quivering octogenarian Nazi war criminals being led away in chains. Why not then? It's too late now. I want to see them taken back in time and punished then.

HEDYLOGOS - the spirit of the language of love and terms of endearment, who now, one assumes, looks over Valentines cards, love-letters and romantic fiction.

The British are like that, especially the middle class Radio 4 audience: a young snappy, angry person annoys them, and they shout at the radio for him to show some respect and get the spiritual and intellectual equivalent of a haircut. But let the same sentiments exactly, word for word, be uttered in high academic tones, as if by a compound of G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and Anthony Quinton, and they will roll onto their tummies and purr.

The Guti were a band of mountain barbarians. It's always the way, isn't it? Everything is blamed on 'the barbarians

It is the fate of the young never to learn," the centaur sighed. "I suppose it is arrogance and unwavering self-belief that propels them to their triumphs, just as surely as it is arrogance and unwavering self-belief that unseats them and sends them plummeting to their ends.

Wicked men never learn, for wicked men have no interest in myths, legends and stories. If they had they would learn from them and triumph, so we must be glad of their ignorance and dullness of wits.

Just let the words fly from your lips and your pen. Give them rhythm and depth and height and silliness. Give them filth and form and noble stupidity. Words are free and all words, light and frothy, firm and sculpted as they may be, bear the history of their passage from lip to lip over thousands of years. How they feel to us now tells us whole stories of our ancestors.

What walks on four feet in the morning, two feet at noon, and three in the evening?

ERIS (DISCORDIA), Strife, lay behind all disagreements, divorces, scraps, skirmishes, fights, battles and wars. It was her malicious wedding present, the legendary Apple of Discord, that brought about the Trojan War

Have faith in what music can do.

wisdom is the ability to cope

Strife's sister NEMESIS was the embodiment of Retribution, that remorseless strand of cosmic justice that punishes presumptuous, overreaching ambition – the vice that the Greeks called hubris.

Alexander Graham Bell was said to have made the following entirely endearing remark soon after he had invented the telephone: 'I do not think I am exaggerating the possibilities of this invention,' he said, 'when I tell you that it is my firm belief that one day there will be a telephone in every major town in America.

suggested that a life without sex and without the presence of a partner offered numerous benefits. The celibate life allowed productivity, independence and ease free from the pressures of placating and accommodating the will and desires of another: released from the degrading imperatives of erotic congress, a new and better kind of life could be lived. Sex was an overrated bore. 'Besides,' I confessed as I ended the article, 'I'm scared that I may not be very good at it.

I suggested that a life without sex and without the presence of a partner offered numerous benefits. The celibate life allowed productivity, independence and ease free from the pressures of placating and accommodating the will and desires of another: released from the degrading imperatives of erotic congress, a new and better kind of life could be lived. Sex was an overrated bore. 'Besides,' I confessed as I ended the article, 'I'm scared that I may not be very good at it.