Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

When acting is going well, the same feeling of mastery of time, of rhythm, control and timing comes over one. Acting, after all, is lying, lying for the pure exquisite joy of it, you might think.

that’s a whole other candle for a whole other cake.

Music, in the precision of its form and the mathematical tyranny of its laws, escapes into an eternity of abstraction and an absurd sublime that is everywhere and nowhere at once.

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 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.

language, which is the parent, not the child, of thought.

was and am both transparent and opaque, illegible and an open book.

people who can change and change again are so much more reliable and happier than those who can’t.