Quotes from Stephen Fry

You cannot control others if you cannot control yourself. Those who most understand their own limitations have the fewest.

Together Perseus and Andromeda look over their unruly shower of meteor children, the PERSEIDS, whom we can still watch showing off in the night sky once a year.

Where am I? 'Why, you are here, your highness.' 'And where is here?' 'Far from there but close to nearby.

We hold on STEVE's still smiling face as MICHAEL passes by. STEVE's eyes follow MICHAEL out of the room and then the smile disappears. It is replaced by a look of hunger and desolation.

I always feel a fool when in the company of people who work for a living. It brings out my startling lack of common sense.

My mother has an absolute passion for sour fruit and can strip a gooseberry bush quicker than a priest can strip a choirboy.

We're delighted to have you here,' he said, putting an arm round the young man's shoulder, 'but a word of advice. Don't try to be clever. We're all clever here. Only try to be kind, a little kind.' Like most university stories, this one is variously attributed and it probably never even happened but, as the Italians say, se non e vero, e ben trovato - even if it isn't true, it's well founded.

As Yoda had expressed it a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away: "Do. Or do not. There is no try.

Green fingers are better than gold.

Myth can be a kind of human algebra, which makes it easier to manipulate truth about ourselves.

Ixion had committed one of the first blood murders; unless he was cleansed of his transgression, the Furies would pursue him until he went mad. The princes, lords and neighbouring landowners of Thessaly had cause to dislike Ixion and none offered to perform the catharsis, the ritual process of purification that would redeem him.

Nephele, the cloud image of Hera, went on to marry a Boeotian king called ATHAMAS,fn2 by whom she bore two sons, PHRIXUS and HELLE. Nephele had cause to save the life of Phrixus – an Isaac to his father's Abraham – when Athamas tied his son to the ground and made to sacrifice him. Just as the Hebrew god revealed a ram in a thicket to Abraham and saved Isaac's life, so Nephele sent a golden ram to rescue her son Phrixus.

Know this: we are a long time dead. Life may be short, but it is sweet."53

So it was that the old Pelasgians drowned in the Great Deluge, and the Mediterranean world was repopulated by a new race descended through Deucalion and Pyrrha from Prometheus, Epimetheus, Pandora and – most importantly of course – from Gaia.fn7 And that is who we are, a compound of foresight and impulse, of all gifts and of the earth.

If this story, the story of Troy, has a meaning or a moral, it is the old, simple lesson that actions have consequences. What Tantalus did, exacerbated by what Pelops did . . . the actions of these two caused a doom to be laid on what was to be the most important royal house of Greece.

The class erupted into noisy laughter and, since I was always, and have always been, determined that merriment should never be seen to be at my expense, I joined in and accepted my star with as much pleased dignity as I could muster.

Sisyphus is still there in the halls of Tartarus, pushing that boulder up the hill and getting almost to the top before it rolls back down and he has to start once again.

The trouble with doing a thing for cosmetic reasons is that one always ends up with a cosmetic result, and cosmetic results, as we know from inspecting rich American women, are ludicrous, embarrassing and horrific.

After all I've done for you? Medea kept her voice steady. 'Who was it who helped you defeat the fire-breathing oven and the great spent of the Grove of Area? Who was it who overcame Talos of Crete...' Yes, yes, yes. But...

he had read and absorbed more than he could understand, so he lived by pastiche and pretence.

If that she-bear had eaten the baby it found o n the mountaintop instead of nursing it, how different the world would now have been

In normal speech and prose our thoughts and feelings are diluted (by stock phrases and roundabout approximations); in poetry those thoughts and feelings can be, must be, concentrated.

His humans were happy, yes; but to Prometheus such a safe, unchallenged, and unchallenging existence had no zest to it.

If only at school, geography teachers, surely the most scoffed and pilloried class of pedagogue there is, if only they had concentrated less on rift valleys, trig points and the major exports of Indonesia and more on the fact that geography could promise a classy royal society with the sexiest lecture theatre in the land.