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Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry is a British writer, comedian, actor, broadcaster and director.
Also see: A Bit Of Fry And Laurie

Sourced

  • An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.
    • The Liar (1991)

  • I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance. That is my religion, and every day I am sorely, grossly, heinously and deeply offended, wounded, mortified and injured by a thousand different blasphemies against it. When the fundamental canons of truth, honesty, compassion and decency are hourly assaulted by fatuous bishops, pompous, illiberal and ignorant priests, politicians and prelates, sanctimonious censors, self-appointed moralists and busy-bodies, what recourse of ancient laws have I? None whatever. Nor would I ask for any. For unlike these blistering imbeciles my belief in my religion is strong and I know that lies will always fail and indecency and intolerance will always perish.
    • "Trefusis Blasphemes" radio broadcast

  • If I had a large amount of money I should certainly found a hospital for those whose grip upon the world is so tenuous that they can be severely offended by words and phrases and yet remain all unoffended by the injustice, violence and oppression that howls daily about our ears.
    • "Trefusis on Any Questions" in Paperweight (1993) p. 61.
    • Originally broadcast on Loose Ends, BBC Radio 4, circa 1987.

  • I don't need you to remind me of my age, I have a bladder to do that for me.
    • "Trefusis Returns!" in Paperweight (1993) p. 279.
    • Originally printed in The Daily Telegraph circa 1990.

  • (On libraries) What's great about them is that anybody can go into them and find a book and borrow it free of charge and read it. They don't have to steal it from a bookshop... You know when you're young, you're growing up, they're almost sexually exciting places because books are powerhouses of knowledge, and therefore they're kind of slightly dark and dangerous. You see books that kind of make you go 'Oh!'
    • Room 101 (2001)

  • The key word for me (my spleen isn't really big enough to explode with all the splenetic juices of fury that drive me when I consider this), but the real key word that triggers my rage is the word 'energy', when people start talking about it in terms of negative or positive types. For instance, "there's very negative energy in here." What are you talking about? What do you mean? I mean, let's think about it. What does energy mean? Well, we know what it means: energy from petrol when it's burned, it moves the car. "This room has positive energy" — well, where the f**k's it going then? It's not moving. It's covering up such woolly thinking, such pathetic nonsense. And astrology: most people will say of astrology, "Well, it's harmless fun." And I should say that for 80% of the cases it probably is harmless fun, but there's a strong way in which it isn't harmless. One, because it is so anti-science. You will hear things like, "Science doesn't know everything." Well, of course science doesn"t know everything. But, because science doesn't know everything, it doesn't mean that science knows nothing. Science knows enough for us to be watched by a few million people now on television, for these lights to be working, for quite extraordinary miracles to have taken place in terms of the harnessing of the physical world and our dim approaches towards understanding it. And as Wittgenstein quite rightly said, "When we understand every single secret of the universe, there will still be left the eternal mystery of the human heart."
    • Room 101 (2001)

  • On the subject of biblical texts and examples to why you can't do certain things with your body that you wish to, I find that absolutely absurd. I've always been extremely uncomfortable with the idea in any society that the belief is based on revealed truth, that's to say on a text like a Bible or a Qur'an, or whatever it is. It seems to me that the greatness of our culture, for all its incredible faults, is that we have grown up on the Greek ideal of discovering the truth, discovering by looking around us, by empirical experiment, by the combination of the experience of generations of ancestors who have contributed to our sum knowledge of the way the world works, and so on. And to have that snatched away and to be told what to think by a book, however great it may be in places, this is a book that says you can sell your daughter into slavery, it's a book that bans menstruating women from within miles of temples. The fact that it also says that for one man to lie with another man is an abomination, is no more made relevant or important than the fact that you can't eat shellfish.
    • Interview with Simon Callow.

  • I don't think we should ever allow religion the trick of maintaining that the spiritual and the beautiful and the noble and the altruistic and the morally strong and the virtuous are in any way inventions of religion or particular or peculiar to religion. It's certainly true that you could say the Christ who said "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone" - that's a wonderful to have said. Anyone who said that would earn a great deal of respect and interest, you'd say that's one of most beautiful phrases ever, ever uttered. But there is no, absolutely no monopoly on beauty and truth in religion, and I suppose one of the reasons that I'm so fond of the Greeks, and one of the reasons that the great radical and poet Shelley wrote his Prometheus Unbound was that he understood that if you were to compare the Genesis myth, which has, which had bedeviled our culture, the Western European culture for a very long time indeed, for two thousand years, it was essentially a myth in which we should be ashamed of ourselves. God says: who told you you were naked? What possible reason have we to believe that we are naked or that if we are naked there is something to be ashamed of, that what we are and what we do is something for which we should ever apologise, we should apologise for our dreams, our impulses, our appetites, our drives, our desires, are not things to apologise for. Our actions sometimes we do apologise for and we excoriate ourselves for and rightly, but that's the Genesis myth. The Greek myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from heaven and who gave to his favourite - his favourite mortal: man. In other words what the Greeks were saying is that we have divine fire, whatever is divine is in us, as humans. We are as good as the gods. The gods are capricious and mean and foolish and stupid and jealous and rapine and all the things that Greek mythology show us that they are, and that's a much better it seems to me - and for that the gods punished Prometheus and chained him to the Caucasus and vultures chewed away at his liver everyday as it regrew because he was immortal of course, and Shelley quite rightly understood - and interestingly his wife of course wrote Frankenstein as the modern Prometheus - understood that that mythological idea, that champion of a real humanity and a real humanism, as we've come to call it, is we are captains of our soul and masters of our destiny, and that we contain any divine fire that there is, divine fire that is fine and great. I mean it's perfectly obvious that if there were ever a God he has lost all possible taste. You've only got to look - forget the aggression and unpleasantness of the radical right or the Islamic hordes to the East - the sheer lack of intelligence and insight and ability to express themselves and to enthuse others of the priesthood and the clerisy here, in this country, and indeed in Europe, you know God once had Bach and Michelangelo on his side, he had Mozart, and now who does he have? People with ginger whiskers and tinted spectacles who reduce the glories of theology to a kind of sharing, you know? That's what religion has become, a feeble and anaemic nonsense, because we understood that the fire was within us, it was not in some idol on an altar, whether it was a gold cross or whether it was a Buddha or anything else, that we have it. The fault is in our stars, but also the glory is (correcting himself) in us not in our stars. The glory - anything - we take credit for what is great about man and we take blame for what is dreadful about man, we neither grovel or apologise at the feet of a god, or are so infantile as to project the idea that we once had a father as human beings and we therefore should have a divine one too. We have to grow up, which is partly what Christopher was saying.
    • The Blasphemy Debate with Christopher Hitchens
    • On the Guardian website

  • Almost the whole of my text at the moment, in my head as I fall asleep, is summed up by the word "contempt". Contempt, in politics, for the hypocrisy, the double standards, the double dealing, the corruption and the moral suasion. It's almost impossible for me to explain just how deeply I feel contempt. I want to go into detail - and I think you'll be rather shocked, and I hope rather edified, by what I have to say. So who are these terrible hypocrites? Who are these double dealers? Who are these liars and fraudulent corrupt people? Well, you're listening to one of them: that's me. And I'm talking to millions of them: that's you. It's not the politicians, God bless them. Sexless, uninteresting, graceless and very often styleless people as they may be, it is we who are the problem in politics. We expect a very high standard of living. We expect food to be cheap and available. We expect energy to be cheap and available. we also expect to be able to mouth off at parties about how terrible it is that the ozone layer is being eaten away and the glaciers are melting and how awful it is that people are starving in other countries. And we pay this group of styleless sexless people whom we call politicians a small amount of money in order to lay off our own guilt. Our own cant and hypocrisy is laid at their door. And apparently, it's they who are the hypocrites. It is they who are corrupt. it is they who refuse to solve the problems of the world. Well, it isn't. It's us. It's me, and it's you. Take this week, for example. Suppose you're prime minister, you've got all these illegal immigrants. What are you supposed to do? Are you supposed to hide the true facts? That's hardly something the public would accept, so you campaign and you say "we don't know how many there are - let's do something about it", and then you're accused of incompetence. Well, of course you don't know how many there are: they're illegal immigrants. Do we expect magic from our politicians? We're not going to get it. They're just human beings like you and me. And what about this "Let's Talk" business? Yes, it sounds like a very bad BT advert. On the other hand, what would we say if they didn't say that? We'd say that they're arrogant, and that they never listen. They can't win because they've got us to serve, and we are filth. The wheels have come off the New Labour project, everyone agrees, and so therefore it will come to pass. All aeroplanes have a certain amount of life in the sky, and then metal fatigue hits and they fall out of it. As someone who worked hard for a Labour victory in the 90s, do I regret it? Not really. It was bound to happen. And it'll happen with the next government, and the one after it. Because all governments serve us. They serve the filth.

  • I should say today that it's tragic that people lose faith in what was once an honourable profession but people will lose faith in journalists. There's nothing one can do about it. People no longer trust journalists - we'll have to turn to politics instead for our belief in people. I almost mean that. Although, of course, anybody can talk about snouts in troughs and go on about it, for journalists to do so is almost beyond belief. Beyond belief. I know lots of journalists - I know more journalists than I know politicians - and I've never met a more venal and disgusting crowd of people when it comes to expenses and allowances...Not all [of them] but then not all human beings are either. I've cheated expenses. I've fiddled things. You have, of course you have. Let's not confuse what politicians get really wrong - things like wars, things where people die - with the rather tedious bourgeois obsession with whether or not they've charged for their wisteria. It's not that important, it really isn't. It isn't what we're fighting for. It isn't what voting is for and the idea that 'Oh, we've all lost faith in politics' [is] nonsense. It's a journalistic made-up frenzy. I know you don't want me to say that. You want me to say "No, it matters, it's important." It isn't it. Believe me, it isn't. It's not the big deal; it's not what we should be worrying about. I know no one's going to pay any attention and newspapers will great joy over filling yards and yards of newsprint with tiny, pointless details of this politician's or that politician's squalid and sad little life as they see it. It's not the big picture, it really isn't. You know, we get the politicians we deserve, it's our fault as much as anybody else's. This has been going on for years and suddenly because a journalist discovers it it's the biggest story ever! It's absolute nonsense, it really is.
    • On the expenses scandal in the UK.
    • On Newsnight on the BBC Website

  • There’s nothing worse than the British in one of their fits of morality.
    • On the expenses scandal in the UK.
    • Quoted in Pink News

  • greasy, miserable, British and pathetic
    • On the sacking of Angus Deayton from Have I Got News For You
    • On the BBC Website

  • He takes coke and has slept with a prostitute - but he's a TV presenter for God's sake!
    • On the sacking of Angus Deayton from Have I Got News For You.
    • Quoted in The Independent

  • I think faith in each other is much harder than faith in God or faith in crystals. I very rarely have faith in God; I occasionally have little spasms of it, but they go away, if I think hard enough about it. I am incandescent with rage at the idea of horoscopes and of crystals and of the nonsense of 'New Age', or indeed even more pseudo-scientific things: self-help, and the whole culture of 'searching for answers', when for me, as someone brought up in the unashamed Western tradition of music and poetry and philosophy, all the answers are there in the work that has been done by humanity before us, in literature, in art, in science, in all the marvels that have created this moment now, instead of people looking away. The image to me . . . is gold does exist, and for 'gold' say 'truth', say 'the answer', say 'love', say 'justice', say anything: it does exist. But the only way in this world you can achieve gold is to be incredibly intelligent about geology, to learn what mankind has learnt, to learn where it might lie, and then break your fingers and blister your skin in digging for it, and then sweat and sweat in a forge, and smelt it. And you will have gold, but you will never have it by closing your eyes and wishing for it. No angel will lean out of the bar of heaven and drop down sheets of gold for you. And we live in a society in which people believe they will. But the real answer, that there is gold, and that all you have to do is try and understand the world enough to get down into the muck of it, and you will have it, you will have truth, you will have justice, you will have understanding, but not by wishing for it.
    • Radio interview promoting Stephen Fry in America.


  • You cannot work too hard at poetry. People are bad at it not because they have tin ears, but because they simply don't have the faintest idea how much work goes into it. It's not as if you're ordering a pizza or doing something that requires direct communication in a very banal way. But it seems these days the only people who spend time over things are retired people and prisoners. We bolt things, untasted. It's so easy to say, 'That'll do.' Everyone's in a hurry. People are intellectually lazy, morally lazy, ethically lazy...All the time. When people get angry with a traffic warden they don't stop and think what it would be like to be a traffic warden or how annoying it would be if people could park wherever they liked. People talk lazily about how hypocritical politicians are. But everyone is. On the one hand we hate that petrol is expensive and on the other we go on about global warming. We abrogate the responsibility for thought and moral decisions onto others and then have the luxury of saying it's not good enough.

Moab is My Washpot (autobiography, 1997)

  • I have always disbelieved that Sicilian saying about revenge being a dish best served cold. I feel that--don't you?--when I see blinking, quivering octogenarian Nazi war criminals being led away in chains. Why not then? It's too late now. I want to see them taken back in time and punished then...Blame, certainly, is a dish only edible when served fresh and warm. Old blames, grudges and scores congeal and curdle and cause the most terrible indigestion.

  • I have to mime at parties when everyone sings Happy Birthday . . . mime or mumble and rumble and growl and grunt so deep that only moles, manta rays and mushrooms can hear me.
    • on his frustrating inability to sing

  • I know that my early life was at one and the same time so common as to be unremarkable, and so strange as to be the stuff of fiction. I know of course that this is how all human lives are, but that it is only given to a few of us to luxuriate in the bath of self-revelation, self-curiosity, apology, revenge, bafflement, vanity and egoism that goes under the name Autobiography. You have seen me at my washpot scrubbing at the grime of years: to wallow in a washpot may not be the same thing as to be purified and cleansed, but I have come away from this very draining, highly bewildering and passionately intense few months feeling slightly less dirty. Less dirty about the first twenty years of my life, at least. The second twenty, now that is another story.

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

  • It is, I know, for I have experienced it perhaps twice in my life, an awful privilege to be too much loved and perhaps the kindest thing I ever did in my life was never to let Matthew know to what degree he had destroyed my peace and my happiness.

  • I remember nothing of this, no ambulance rides, nothing. Nothing between switching out the bedside lamp and the sudden indignity of rebirth: the slaps, the brightness, the tubing, the speed, the urgent insistence that I be choked back into breathing life. I have felt so sorry for babies ever since.
    • On his suicide attempt at age 17

  • LSD reveals the whatness of things, their quiddity, their essence. The wateriness of water is suddenly revealed to you, the carpetness of carpets, the woodness of wood, the yellowness of yellow, the fingernailness of fingernails, the allness of all, the nothingness of all, the allness of nothing. For me music gives access to every one of these essences of existence, but at a fraction of the social or financial cost of a drug and without the need to cry 'Wow!' all the time, which is one of LSD's most distressing and least endearing side-effects.
  • When I had first caught sight of Matthew I saw the beauty in everything. Now I saw only ugliness and decay. All beauty was in the past. Again and again I wrote in poems, in notes, on scraps of paper. My whole life stretched out gloriously behind me. If I wrote that sick phrase once, I wrote it fifty times. And I believed it, too.

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

  • My vocal cords are made of tweed. I give off an air of Oxford donnishness and old BBC wirelesses.

  • My first words, as I was being born... I looked up at my mother and said, "that's the last time I'm coming out one of those."
    • On being gay
      • Stephen Fry actually admitted this was a quote from a friend, not himself. (Moab Is My Washpot)

  • I used many times to touch my own chest and feel, under its asthmatic quiver, the engine of the heart and lungs and blood and feel amazed at what I sensed was the enormity of the power I possessed. Not magical power, but real power. The power simply to go on, the power to endure, that is power enough, but I felt I had also the power to create, to add, to delight, to amaze and to transform.

  • Didn't Woody Allen say that all literature was a footnote to Faust? Perhaps all adolescence is a dialogue between Faust and Christ. We tremble on the brink of selling that part of ourselves that is real, unique, angry, defiant and whole for the rewards of attainment, achievement, success and the golden prizes of integration and acceptance; but we also in our great creating imagination, rehearse the sacrifice we will make: the pain and terror we will take from others' shoulders; our penetration into the lives and souls of our fellows; our submission to willingness to be rejected and despised for the sake of truth and love and, in the wilderness, our angry rebuttals of the hypocrisy, deception and compromise of a world which we see to be so false. There is nothing so self-righteous nor so right as an adolescent imagination.
    • On adolescence

Quotes from Twitter

  • Weak watery sun, but sun nonetheless. Why does it take me nearly 2 hours just to get through the morning emails? Pah, poo and pants.

  • I gather a repulsive nobody writing in a paper no one of any decency would be seen dead with has written something loathesome and inhumane.


Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/16/jan-moir-column-on-stephe_n_323964.html
 
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