Quotes from Stephen Fry

It is a cliché that most clichés are true, but then like most clichés, that cliché is untrue

It is complete loose stool water. It is arse-gravy of the worst kind. - About The Da Vinci Code

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

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

Anger fed him and clothed him and he owed it much.

A month's salary, deep regret, the telephone number of some foul rehab clinic and my lance was free.

If I had been psychopathic enough to feel no remorse or religious enough to believe in redemption through a divine outside agency, perhaps I should have been happier; as it was I had neither the consolation that I was free of guilt, nor the conviction that I could ever be forgiven.

I found it all about as arousing as a Tupperware party.

I'm not even tone deaf, that's the arse-mothering, fuck-nosed, bugger-sucking wank of the thing. I'M NOT EVEN TONE FUCKING DEAF. I'm tone DUMB.

Few heroes die peacefully in their beds after long lives filled with happiness.

Even meaning and destiny themselves can be read in ordinary things, if you have the gift.

Glory never arrives through the front door. She sneaks in uninvited round the back or through an upstairs window while you are sleeping.

Picture this scene. A critic arrives at the gates of heaven. 'And what did you do?' asks Saint Peter. 'Well', says the dead soul. 'I criticised things'. 'I beg your pardon?' 'You know, other people wrote things, performed things, painted things and I said stuff like, thin and unconvincing, turgid and uninspired, competent and serviceable,...you know'.

To be human and to be adult means constantly to be in the grip of opposing emotions, to have daily to reconcile apparently conflicting tensions. I want this, but need that. I cherish this, but I adore its opposite too.

Madam, I have been looking for a person who disliked gravy all my life; let us swear eternal friendship'.

I was born Mary Patterson, but then I married and naturally took my husband's name, so now I'm Neil Patterson.

It is their refusal to see any divine beings as perfect, whole and complete of themselves, whether Zeus, Moros or Prometheus, that makes the Greeks so satisfying.

I never quite got the hang of the getting drunk & fondling the thighs [of all the cumbersome young males] business... whether that makes me a gallant & proper gentleman, a cowardly wuss or an unadventurous prude, I cannot make out

It may be that The Great Gatsby is as perfect, word for word, just in terms of English; but Ulysses is deeper, richer, wider – and is comic, whereas The Great Gatsby is a tragic novel. And I think all great art is comic art. ( video )

Late, Fry?' 'Really, sir? So am I.' 'Don't try to be clever, boy.' 'Very good, sir. How stupid would you like me to be? Very stupid or only slightly stupid?

At John Schlesinger's funeral at a synagogue in St John's Wood some years ago the person I stood next to said to me encouragingly, 'Come on, Stephen - you're not singing. Have a go!' 'Believe me, Paul, you don't want me to,' I said. Besides, I was having a much better time listening to him. 'No. Go on!' So I joined in the chorus. 'You're right,' Paul McCartney conceded. 'You can't sing.

All gone. All anger quelled, all desire drained, all thirst slaked, all madness past.

That's alright, said Hugo. I've got some wine Which was about all he seemed to have. He poured out two mugfuls. Very nice, said Adrian, sipping appreciatively. I wonder how they got the cat to sit on the bottle. It's cheap, that's the main thing.

Knowing those things are going to kill you, she said, and still you do it. How differently I might behave, Tom said, if immortality were an option.