Quotes from Stephen Fry

My secret is that I have never thought there is a secret to anything in life. Passion. Love. Drive. Work. Work. Work. Dull but true.

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.

Moving from chair to chair, from coffee machine to coffee machine is the limit of my action in most films. But I enjoy being cast in them because I love watching them.

That one can love another of the same gender, that is what the homophobe really cannot stand.

If you go looking for loonies and religious fanatics and dropouts and freaks, I dare say you'll find it.

Having been an actor and a writer for so long - 20 years or so - I felt that it would be daft to go to one's grave without having directed. It's a natural extension of writing and acting, and so I knew it would happen one day.

Somehow, as a writer, you tend to use words to paper over structural cracks.

Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.

All the big words -virtue, justice, truth, ...- are dwarfed by the greatness of kindness

I feel I would love to close down for a number of years in some way and just be in the country making pork pies and chutneys and never have to poke my head out of the parapet.

I think people talk about one love, but there is the need to love and the need to be loved are not the same thing and I suppose that's... and it's working that out is part of growing up.

Places of incredible glamour, possibility, power, excitement and pleasure. Love your libraries!

Just as it is the love of money that is the root of all evil, it is the belief in shamefulness that is the root of all misery.

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

You can't reason yourself back into cheerfulness any more than you can reason yourself into an extra six inches in height.

It's now very common to hear people say, "I'm rather offended by that", as if that gives them certain rights. It's no more than a whine. It has no meaning, it has no purpose, it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. "I'm offended by that." Well, so fucking what?

It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

You are who you are when nobody's watching.

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.

When you get just a complete sense of blackness or void ahead of you, that somehow the future looks an impossible place to be, and the direction you are going seems to have no purpose, there is this word despair which is a very awful thing to feel.

I like to think of myself at home in the armchair, writing, smoking and occasionally wandering down the shop.

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.

I don't watch television, I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.

An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.