Quotes By Stephen Fry

You can act in five, six, or seven films in the time it takes to direct one film.

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

Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.

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.

I get an urge, like a pregnant elephant, to go away and give birth to a book.

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.

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.

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

I think we have all experienced passion that is not in any sense reasonable.

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.

There's no doubt that I do have extremes of mood that are greater than just about anybody else I know.

I shouldn't be saying this - high treason, really - but I sometimes wonder if Americans aren't fooled by our accent into detecting brilliance that may not really be there.

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

I went to Cambridge and thought I would stay there. I thought I would quietly grow tweed in a corner somewhere and become a Don or something.

Because, let's face it, I do not get offered the parts that Brad Pitt has just turned down.

Many people would no more think of entering journalism than the sewage business - which at least does us all some good.

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

Old Professors never die, they just lose their faculties.

When you've seen a nude infant doing a backward somersault you know why clothing exists.

Oh, it takes a lot for me to walk out of a film.

Happiness is no respecter of persons.

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

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.

Now, bipolar disorder, it goes on a spectrum. There's very severe conditions of it and there are milder ones. I'm lucky enough that it's reasonably mild in my case.

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

No, I love the idea that someone changes. As an actor it's always the thing that you look for. He is someone who starts off bright, cheerful and confident and then has everything taken away from him. It's a wonderful journey to take.

I'm a bit of a coward, and lazy, oddly enough.

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.

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'd probably want to teach at university, because children would drive me insane. I suspect it would be English literature, Shakespeare and so forth. I've always been deeply, deeply in love with that kind of thing.