Quotes from Stephen Fry

It only takes a room of Americans for the English and Australians to realise how much we have in common.

You can't just say there is a god because the world is beautiful. You have to account for bone cancer in children.

How can I tell you what I think until I've heard what I'm going to say?

I'm fat because I'm greedy, and if my mind is fat it's because I'm curious.

I think the fact that I'm so well known to be gay makes it very difficult to have a convincing relationship with a woman on screen. It wouldn't be at all difficult for me to kiss a woman - I'll kiss a frog if you like.

A cousin of mine who was a casualty surgeon in Manhattan tells me that he and his colleagues had a one-word nickname for bikers: Donors. Rather chilling.

Hell, I am young. I am free. My teeth are clean. The sun shines. To hell with everything else

But if one could go back in time, I'd love to have been directed by Howard Hawks, who's one of my great heroes. One of the greatest directors there ever was. He directed probably one of the greatest westerns of all time in 'Rio Bravo'.

I think my view is that whenever you project into the future you're never likely to be accurate in the details, or the paraphernalia and style. It's in the spirit of it.

They are just 100 per cent bear, whereas human beings feel we're not 100 per cent human, that we're always letting ourselves down. We're constantly striving towards something, to some fulfilment.

It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh... Robert Schumann has been mentioned... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath... some of them with rather grim ends.

Philosophy is an odd thing... There is no particular Socratic or Dimechian or Kantian way to live your life. They don't offer ethical codes and standards by which to live your life.

My life, at least, is divided between writing and performing and mixtures of the two.

Well, isn't it splendid & rather toffee?

Old Professors never die, they just lose their faculties.

I have pushed the boat out as far as I should in terms of taking on too many things. I'm getting older and I just could not take it any more. I am now monitoring myself very closely and I'm just trying not to get into that sort of state again.

A book is judged, not by its reference to life, but by its reference to other books.

Life, that can shower you with so much splendour, is unremittingly cruel to those who have given up.

There is so much we can learn from TV. It's a window on the world.

Life is sometimes novel-shaped, mocking the efforts of those authors who, in an effort to make their novels life-shaped, spurn the easy symmetry and cheap resonance of reality.

Generally, we admire the thing we are not.

This is the point. One technology doesn't replace another, it complements. Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.

Part of life is learning what to be ashamed of and what to be proud of.

A university is not, thank heavens, a place for vocational instruction, it has nothing to do with training for a working life and career, it is a place for education, something quite different.