Quotes By Stephen Fry

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

Personally, I'd never seen a graphic novel. I knew they existed because friends of mine like Jonathan Ross collect them and some very literate and intelligent people really rate the graphic novel as a form.

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

My father was all brain and little heart.

I think the fact that I'm so well known to be gay makes it very difficult to have a convincing relationship with a woman on screen. It wouldn't be at all difficult for me to kiss a woman - I'll kiss a frog if you like.

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.

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 have pushed the boat out as far as I should in terms of taking on too many things. I'm getting older and I just could not take it any more. I am now monitoring myself very closely and I'm just trying not to get into that sort of state again.

Taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once. It is an insult to creation not to experience it fully. Temperance is wickedness.

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

It was extremely important to show that Wilde's sexuality was not just some intellectual idea. It was real, and it was about the human body. To just have mentioned it and not shown it would have been, I think, peculiar and wrong.

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.

But happiness is no respecter of persons.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don't need you to remind me of my age. I have a bladder to do that for me.

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.