Quotes by Stephen Fry

“Certainly the most destructive vice if you like, that a person can have. More than pride, which is supposedly the number one of the cardinal sins - is self pity. Self pity is the worst possible emo...”

“People who can change and change again are so much more reliable and happier than those who cant”

“If you know someone whos depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isnt a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather.Try to understand the b...”

“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 ...”

“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....”

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself and you will be happy.”

“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.”

“Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no t...”

“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 whet...”

“It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more... than a whine. 'I find that offensive.' It has no meaning;...”

“An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.”

“No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time.”

“Compromise is a stalling between two fools.”

“It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathingthey are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would nev...”

“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 ri...”

“Music is everything and nothing. It is useless and no limit can be set on its use. Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lov...”

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

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

“You are who you are when nobody's watching.”

“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 th...”