Stephen Fry
Atheism is not just about not believing there is a God, but on the assumption that there is one, what kind of God is he?Collection: Believe
To me, reason is as spiritual as anything else, the beauty of reason seems to me indelible and ineffable and numinous... the spirit is after all the same word we use to describe... essenceCollection: Spiritual
Wisdom is probably the ability to cope. That's why someone who has to walk seven miles every day to get water for their children can be wiser than someone sitting behind a desk in Wall Street.Collection: Children
I may have looked happy but inside I was hopelessly depressed.Collection: Depression
Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.Collection: Friendly
Everything had been based on a kind of certainty, a sense of man at the center of things, a sense of order and hierarchy. And suddenly, almost simultaneously, extraordinary discoveries are made.Collection: Men
Estate agents: like them or loathe them, you'd be mad not to loathe them.Collection: Mad
As I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters but me.Collection: Ambition
One of the nice things about looking at a bear is that you know it spends 100 per cent of every minute of every day being a bear. It doesn't strive to become a better bear. It doesn't go to sleep thinking, "I wasn't really a very good bear today". 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 fulfilmentCollection: Nice
As humourless a lump of dough as ever held a torchlight vigil outside the South African Embassy or stuck an AIDS awareness ribbon on an unwilling first-nighter.Collection: Funny
I certainly don't want to be formulaic. I want to be honest and authentic and everything else.Collection: Want
The Gay News critic wrote that I 'carried the lilt of the Irish without the brogue'.Collection: Gay
Coming out as gay was an easy enough matter for me, since I worked in a profession where being gay had a long history of being accepted.Collection: Gay
How to seperate the humiliation from the loss, that's the catch. You can never be sure if what tortures you is the pain of being without someone you love or the embarrassment of admitting that you have been rejected.Collection: Pain
You can never hope to recapture the first fine careless rapture as the poet put it, but it stays with you like a good acid trip.Collection: Firsts
I am aware of the technical distinction between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’, and between ‘uninterested’ and ‘disinterested’ and ‘infer’ and ‘imply’, but none of these are of importance to me. ‘None of these are of importance,’ I wrote there, you’ll notice – the old pedantic me would have insisted on “none of them is of importance”. Well I’m glad to say I’ve outgrown that silly approach to languageCollection: Silly
The worst of this sorry bunch of semi-educated losers are those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs. How dense and deaf to language development do you have to be? If you don’t like nouns becoming verbs, then for heaven’s sake avoid Shakespeare who made a doing-word out of a thing-word every chance he got. He TABLED the motion and CHAIRED the meeting in which nouns were made verbsCollection: Sorry
I was born Mary Patterson, but then I married and naturally took my husband's name, so now I'm Neil Patterson.Collection: Husband
Lectures broke into one's day and were clearly a terrible waste of time, necessary no doubt if you were reading law or medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English, the natural thing to do was talk a lot, listen to music, drink coffee and wine, read books, and go to plays, perhaps be in plays.Collection: Coffee
I expected the illegible and the deeply buried in me to be read as if carved on my forehead, just as I expected the obvious and the ill-concealed to be hidden from view.Collection: Views
It was behaviour that I thought not far from racism, sexism or any other kind of prejudice or snobbery. 'Because you are not cute, I do not want to know you' was, to me, hardly different from suggesting 'because you are gay, I dislike youCollection: Cute
I never quite got the hang of the getting drunk & fondling the thighs [of all the cumbersome young males] business... whether that makes me a gallant & proper gentleman, a cowardly wuss or an unadventurous prude, I cannot make outCollection: Drunk
I now accept that it is looking increasingly likely that Tiger Woods is, in fact, straight.Collection: Woods
This new England we have invented for ourselves is not interested at all in education. It is only interested in training, both material and spiritual. Education means freedom, it means ideas, it means truth. Training is what you do to a pear tree when you pleach it and prune it to grow against a wall. Training is what you give an airline pilot or a computer operator or a barrister or a radio producer. Education is what you give children to enable them to be free from the prejudices and moral bankruptcies of their elders.Collection: Spiritual
Like vichyssoise, revenge is a dish best served cold.Collection: Revenge
If a thing can be said in ten words, I may be relied upon to take a hundred to say it. I ought to apologize for that. I ought to prune, pare and extirpate excess growth, but I will not. I like words—strike that, I love words—and while I am fond of the condensed and economical use of them in poetry, in song lyrics, in Twitter, in good journalism and smart advertising, I love the luxuriant profusion and mad scatter of them too.Collection: Song
There is simply no limit to the tyrannical snobbery that otherwise decent people can descend into when it comes to music.Collection: People
How can one not be fond of something that the Daily Mail despises?Collection: Daily Mail
This is the point. One technology doesn’t replace another, it complements. Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.Collection: Book
I’m absolute attacking my own instinct for politeness, but I think I admire artists who just speak out or who are strong, so it’s very hard.Collection: Strong
Wine can be a better teacher than ink, and banter is often better than books.Collection: Book
You can never hope to recapture the first fine careless rapture.Collection: Firsts
An original idea. That can’t be too hard. The library must be full of them.Collection: Book
But an Adrian also knew that an Adrian’s lies were real: they were lived and felt and acted out as thoroughly as another man’s truths – if other men had truths – and he believed it possible that this last lie might see him through to the grave.Collection: Real
I’ve always had great respect for Paddington because he is amusingly English and eccentric. He is a great British institution and my generation grew up with the books and then Michael Horden’s animations.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Real