Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

We keep our insignificant blemishes so that we can blame them for our larger defects.

I’m a brilliant liar. So brilliant that I do it when there isn’t even the faintest chance of being believed. That’s lying for the sake of it, not lying purely to achieve some fatuous end. That’s real lying.

Then again, in my unqualified opinion, Judas Iscariot, Nero and Count Dracula are all better advertisements for Christianity than St. Paul … but that’s a whole other candle for a whole other cake.

Nothing prayed for—it is life’s strictest and least graceful rule—comes to you at the time of praying. Good things always come too late.

There is simply no limit to the tyrannical snobbery that otherwise decent people can descend into when it comes to music.

Playing the piano is not the same as making music.

Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have also 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.

They go forth into it with well developed bodies, fairly developed minds and undeveloped hearts … An undeveloped heart, not a cold one. The difference is important …

Emotion has nothing to do with appropriateness. It matters only that it shall be sincere.

I will apologise for many things that I have done, but I will not apologise for the things that should never be apologised for. It is a little theory of mine that has much exercised my mind lately, that most of the problems of this silly and delightful world derive from our apologising for those things which we ought not to apologise for, and failing to apologise for those things for which apology is necessary.

A culture that demands people apologise for something that is not their fault: that is as good a definition of a tyranny as I can think of.

Possessions, money, property—on such corrupt standards as these do you people measure happiness and success.

Good advice, like a secret, is easier to give away than to keep.

Until someone has loved they cannot possibly know what it might be like to be loved.

There is some absurd steroid that floats about inside the male and makes him feel ten foot tall just because he’s been able to come.

You can’t outgrow Keats any more than you can outgrow nitrogen.

It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe, but not worth bothering with.

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.

My heart was never in it, but my loins were very grateful indeed for the outing and the exercise.

Life, that can shower you with so much splendour, is unremittingly cruel to those who have given up. Thank the gods there is such a thing as redemption, the redemption that comes in the form of other people the moment you are prepared to believe that they exist.

Life is sometimes novel-shaped, mocking the efforts of those authors who, in an effort to make their novels life-shaped, spurn the easy symmetry and cheap resonance of reality.

If I truly cared about what people thought, surely I would alter not my reactions, but my actions.

(“Anyone can play accurately, but I play with wonderful expression. As far as the piano is concerned, sentiment is my forte.”