"An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them."
— Stephen Fry

"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."
— Stephen Fry (Paperweight)

"Stop feeling sorry for yourself and you will be happy."
— Stephen Fry

"I am a lover of truth, a worshiper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance."
— Stephen Fry

"It is a cliche that most cliches are true, but then like most cliches, that cliche is untrue."
— Stephen Fry

"Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me."
— Stephen Fry (Moab Is My Washpot)

"My first words, as I was being born... I looked up at my mother and said, "that's the last time I'm going up one of those."
— Stephen Fry

"No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time."
— Stephen Fry (Moab Is My Washpot)

"The short answer to that is 'no'. The long answer is 'f*** no'."
— Stephen Fry

"The alarm in the morning? Well, I have an old tape of Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in a perfectly transcendent version in Shubert's seventh symphony. And I've rigged it up so that at exactly 7:30 every morning it falls from the ceiling onto my face."
— Stephen Fry

"The biggest challenge facing the great teachers and communicators of history is not to teach history itself, nor even the lessons of history, but why history matters. How to ignite the first spark of the will o'the wisp, the Jack o'lantern, the ignis fatuus [foolish fire] beloved of poets, which lights up one source of history and then another, zigzagging across the marsh, connecting and linking and writing bright words across the dark face of the present. There's no phrase I can come up that will encapsulate in a winning sound-bite why history matters. We know that history matters, we know that it is thrilling, absorbing, fascinating, delightful and infuriating, that it is life. Yet I can't help wondering if it's a bit like being a Wagnerite; you just have to get used to the fact that some people are never going to listen."
— Stephen Fry (Making History)

"I have written it before and am not ashamed to write it again. Without Wodehouse I am not sure that I would be a tenth of what I am today -- whatever that may be. In my teenage years, his writings awoke me to the possibilities of language. His rhythms, tropes, tricks and mannerisms are deep within me.
But more than that, he taught me something about good nature. It is enough to be benign, to be gentle, to be funny, to be kind."
— Stephen Fry

"Compromise is a stalling between two fools."
— Stephen Fry

"... literary studies were no more than a series of autopsies performed by heartless technicians. Worse than autopsies: biopsies. Vivisection. Even movies, which I love more than anything, more than life itself, they even do it with movies these days."
— Stephen Fry (Making History)

"I like to wake up each morning and not know what I think, that I may reinvent myself in some way."
— Stephen Fry

"How can one not be fond of something that the "Daily Mail" despises?"
— Stephen Fry

"We don't stop talking about how the world might be better just because we have no chance of making it to Prime Minister. We are all politicians. We are all artists. In an open society everything the mind and hands can achieve is our birthright. It is up to us to claim it."
— Stephen Fry (The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within)

"I said it before and I’ll say it again: books are dead, plays are dead, poems are dead: there’s only movies.

Music is still okay, because music is sound track. Ten, fifteen years ago, every arts student wanted to be a novelist or a playwright. I’d be amazed if you could find a single one now with such a dead-end ambition. They all want to make movies. Not write movies. You don’t write movies. You make movies."
— Stephen Fry (Making History)

"Estate agents: like them or loathe them, you'd be mad not to loathe them."
— Stephen Fry

"If you have been, I'm glad you've stopped."
— Stephen Fry

"I'm not even tone deaf, that's the arse-mothering, fuck-nosed, bugger-sucking wank of the thing."
— Stephen Fry (Moab Is My Washpot)

"Sometimes there just isn't enough vomit in the world."
— Stephen Fry

"I have a dark and dreadful secret. I write poetry... I believe poetry is a primal impulse within all of us. I believe we are all capable of it and furthermore that a small, often ignored corner of us positively yearns to try it."
— Stephen Fry (The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within)

"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."
— Stephen Fry (Moab Is My Washpot)

"I flicked my eyes over to Steve again and saw him straighten. He would need a diversion just to start.

“Explanations?” I bellowed. “Explanations? There’s your explanation…there!” I stabbed a finger dramatically towards the far corner of the room.

Pathetic, really. I mean, talk about the oldest trick in the book. But it’s a good book, and the trick would have been cut from subsequent editions if it didn’t sometimes work."
— Stephen Fry (Making History)

"Like a Frenchman, far from home, catching a whiff of Gauloise."
— Stephen Fry (The Stars' Tennis Balls)

"Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the word's full octave"
— Stephen Fry

"It's as if scientists exert every effort of will they possess deliberately to find the least significant problems in the world and explain them. Art matters. Happiness matters. Love matters. Good matters. Evil matters. Slam the fridge door. They are the only things that matter and they are of course precisely the things that science goes out of its way to ignore."
— Stephen Fry (Making History)

"A month's salary, deep regret, the telephone number of some foul rehab clinic and my lance was free."
— Stephen Fry (The Hippopotamus)

"I also knew that he was the kind of anile little runt who, in foyers and theatre bars the West End over, can be heard bleating into their gin and tonics, "I go to the theatre to be entertained."
— Stephen Fry (The Hippopotamus)

"It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing - they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me."
— Stephen Fry (Moab Is My Washpot)