Stephen Fry
Stephen Fry
Stephen John Fry is an English comedian, actor, writer, presenter and activist. After a troubled childhood and adolescence, during which he was expelled from two schools and spent three months in prison for credit card fraud, Fry secured a place at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he studied English literature. While at university, he became involved with the Cambridge Footlights, where he met his long-time collaborator Hugh Laurie. As half of the comic double act Fry and Laurie, he co-wrote and...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth24 August 1957
CityHampstead, England
People who can change and change again are so much more reliable and happier than those who can’t
The Greeks understood perfectly that if there were divine beings they are capricious, unkind, malicious mostly, temperamental, envious and mostly deeply unpleasant because that you can say well yes, all right, if there is going to be god or gods then you have to admit that they're very at the very least capricious. They're certainly not consistent. They're certainly not all loving.
It's hard to be a friend to someone who's depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do.
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 torturer could ever devise".
I suppose the thing I most would have liked to have known or been reassured about is that in the world, what counts more than talent, what counts more than energy or concentration or commitment, or anything else - is kindness. And the more in the world that you encounter kindness and cheerfulness - which is its kind of amiable uncle or aunt - the better the world always is. And all the big words: virtue, justice, truth - are dwarfed by the greatness of kindness.
There is not any way that you can just choose the nice bits and say that means there is a God and ignore the true fact of what nature is.
I think we have all experienced passion that is not in any sense reasonable.
I have always been an impassioned advocate for the works of Shakespeare. I regard him as one of the most complete miracles of his or any other age.
Seriousness is no more a guarantee of truth, insight, authenticity or probity, than humour is a guarantee of superficiality and stupidity.
I almost once wanted to publish a self help book saying, 'How To Be Happy, by Stephen Fry: Guaranteed Success'. And people buy this huge book and it's all blank pages, and the first page would just say, 'Stop feeling sorry for yourself--and you will be happy.'
It may be that there is an afterlife and I'll look incredibly stupid, but at least I will have had a crammed pre afterlife, a crammed life, so to me the most important thing is as Kipling put it, to fill every unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run.
Education is the sum of what students teach each other between lectures and seminars.
All the big words -virtue, justice, truth, ...- are dwarfed by the greatness of kindness
The Gay News critic wrote that I 'carried the lilt of the Irish without the brogue'.