Quotes from Stephen Fry

Wanting to be liked is often a very unlikeable characteristic.

Pandora's imprisonment of it was a triumphant act that saved us from Zeus's worst cruelty. With hope, Nietzsche argued, we are foolish enough to believe there is a point to existence, an end and a promise.

You've just had the most imponderable joy of watching charlieissocoollike, which makes you, like, cool.

You want poetry, first you have to muck in with humanity, you have to fight with paper and pencil for weeks and weeks until your heart bleeds: verses aren't channelled into your head by angels or muses or sprites of nature.

This species, the mute swan, became holy to Apollo. In remembrance of the death of the beloved Phaeton the bird is silent all its life until the very moment of its death, when it sings with terrible melancholy its strange and lovely goodbye, its swan song. In honour of Cygnus the young of all swans are called 'cygnets'.

I was happy there. Which is to say I was not unhappy there. Unhappiness and happiness I have always been able to carry about with me, irrespective of place and people, because I have never joined in.

There can't be that many individual souls. Not souls like mine. There isn't room. There can't be.

He had quickly happened upon the truth which many lonely contemporaries would never discover, the truth that everybody, simply everybody, was panting for it and could, with patience, be shown that they were panting for it. So Adrian grabbed what was to hand and had the time of his life genitally - focusing exclusively on his own gender of course, for this was 1973 and girls had not yet been invented.

Either a municipal bog is a private place or it isn't. If it is a private place in which to shit, how is it not a private place in which to fellate?

I think it was Harry Walpole who remarked, In this life one should try everything once except incest and country dancing.

Nothing prayed for – it is life's strictest and least graceful rule – comes to you at the time of praying.

Kronos had seen by now that his wife was expecting and he readied himself for the happy day when he could consume the sixth of his children. He was taking no chances.

Dreams were told to priests on the morning after an overnight stay (known as an 'incubation') and Asclepius himself often manifested to patients. Especially, I believe, to those who paid the most.

Forget him. What is treasure? Or Briseis, or honor, or anything? Next to the life of the one I loved best and dearest? My beloved, my only Patroclus.

Could do better' is a meaningless conclusion. 'Could be happier' is the only one that counts.

Mankind can live free in a society hemmed in by laws, but we have yet to find a historical example of mankind living free in lawless anarchy.

You may be gold, and we poor ordinary men may be of bronze, but ask any solier out there which metal they'd rather have for a sword blae or a spearpoint

It was a Tuesday in February. Many of my life's most awful moments have taken place on Tuesdays. And what is February if not the Tuesday of the year?

When Steampunk meets adventure and adventure meets comedy and comedy meets ingenuity and ingenuity meets charm and charm meets wonder and wonder meets pleasure the result is a Triumph. Dr Grordbort is the future. And the past. Which makes an ideal present.

His reward is the eternal fame that is both priceless and worthless

Read it wisely, Little One, for the power of ignorance is great.

Thos who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it.

How strange is our mortal zest for fame. Perhaps it is the only way humans can be gods. We achieve immortality not through ambrosia and ichor but through history and reputation. Through statues and epic song

The rescue of Aethra and the sparing of Antenor - can be registered as the only lights of clemency an honour that shone during that night of unnameable atrocities