They christened their game golf because they were Scottish and revelled in meaningless Celtic noises in the back of the throat.
Stephen Fry (b. 1957) British actor, writer, comedian
“Sir John Raving: Cricket & Golf,” Paperweight (1992)
(Source)
Originally appeared as a segment in the BBC Radio show Loose Ends in the late 1980s.
Quotations by:
Fry, Stephen
‘But people, the ordinary faithful, are offended by crude comic blasphemies,’ voices are raised to tell me. Yes indeed. But what of my religion? I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance. That is my religion, and every day I am sorely, grossly, heinously and deeply offended, wounded, mortified and injured by a thousand different blasphemies against it. When the fundamental canons of truth, honesty, compassion and decency are hourly assaulted by fatuous bishops, pompous, illiberal and ignorant priests, politicians and prelates, sanctimonious censors, self-appointed moralists and busy-bodies, what recourse of ancient laws have I? None whatever. Nor would I ask for any. For unlike these blistering imbeciles my belief in my religion is strong and I know that lies will always fail and indecency and intolerance will always perish.
Stephen Fry (b. 1957) British actor, writer, comedian
“Trefusis Blasphemes,” Loose Ends, BBC Radio 4 (1986)
(Source)
Reprinted in Paperweight (1992).
These poor afflicted creatures spend their time with an ear against the speaker counting occurrences of the word bugger. If I had a large amount of money I should certainly found a hospital for those whose grip upon the world is so tenuous that they can be severely offended by words and phrases and yet remain all unoffended by the injustice, violence and oppression that howls daily about our ears.
Stephen Fry (b. 1957) British actor, writer, comedian
“Trefusis on Any Questions,” Loose Ends, BBC Radio 4 (c. 1987)
(Source)
Reprinted in Paperweight (1992).
It is astonishing how articulate one can become when alone and raving at a radio. Arguments and counter arguments, rhetoric and bombast flow from one’s lips like scurf from the hair of a bank manager.
Stephen Fry (b. 1957) British actor, writer, comedian
“Trefusis on Any Questions,” Loose Ends, BBC Radio 4 (c. 1987)
(Source)
Reprinted in Paperweight (1992)
A democracy is a means whereby we channel our contempt for our fellow man into a lively scorn for those elected to represent him.
Stephen Fry (b. 1957) British actor, writer, comedian
“Trefusis on Any Questions,” Loose Ends, BBC Radio 4 (c. 1987)
(Source)
Reprinted in Paperweight (1992)
I don’t need you to remind me of my age, I have a bladder to do that for me.
Stephen Fry (b. 1957) British actor, writer, comedian
“Trefusis Returns!” Paperweight (1992)
(Source)
Originally printed in The Daily Telegraph (c. 1990).
On the subject of Biblical texts and examples to why you can’t do certain things with your body that you wish to, I find that absolutely absurd. I’ve always been extremely uncomfortable with the idea in any society that belief is based on revealed truth, that’s to say on a text like a Bible or a Qur’an, or whatever it is. It seems to me that the greatness of our culture, for all its incredible faults, is that we have grown up on the Greek ideal of discovering the truth, discovering by looking around us, by empirical experiment, by the combination of the experience of generations of ancestors who have contributed to our sum knowledge of the way the world works, and so on. And to have that snatched away and to be told what to think by a book, however great it may be in places, this is a book that says you can sell your daughter into slavery, it’s a book that bans menstruating women from within miles of temples. The fact that it also says that for one man to lie with another man is an abomination, is no more made relevant or important than the fact that you can’t eat shellfish.
Stephen Fry (b. 1957) British actor, writer, comedian
An Evening with Callow & Fry, Norwich (2003-12)
(Source)
I remember nothing of this, no ambulance rides, nothing. Nothing between switching out the bedside lamp and the sudden indignity of rebirth: the slaps, the brightness, the tubing, the speed, the urgent insistence that I be choked back into breathing life. I have felt so sorry for babies ever since.
Stephen Fry (b. 1957) British actor, writer, comedian
Moab Is My Washpot, “Breaking Out,” ch. 1 (1997)
(Source)
On his suicide attempt by drug overdose at age 17.
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.
Stephen Fry (b. 1957) British actor, writer, comedian
Moab Is My Washpot, “Falling In,” ch. 3 (1997)
(Source)
Didn’t Woody Allen say that all literature was a footnote to Faust? Perhaps all adolescence is a dialogue between Faust and Christ. We tremble on the brink of selling that part of ourselves that is real, unique, angry, defiant and whole for the rewards of attainment, achievement, success and the golden prizes of integration and acceptance; but we also in our great creating imagination, rehearse the sacrifice we will make: the pain and terror we will take from others’ shoulders; our penetration into the lives and souls of our fellows; our submission to willingness to be rejected and despised for the sake of truth and love and, in the wilderness, our angry rebuttals of the hypocrisy, deception and compromise of a world which we see to be so false. There is nothing so self-righteous nor so right as an adolescent imagination.
Stephen Fry (b. 1957) British actor, writer, comedian
Moab Is My Washpot, “Falling In,” ch. 6 (1997)
(Source)
Come to think of it, I don’t know that love has a point, which is what makes it so glorious. Sex has a point, in terms of relief and, sometimes, procreation, but love, like all art, as Oscar said, is quite useless. 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.
Stephen Fry (b. 1957) British actor, writer, comedian
Moab Is My Washpot, “Falling In,” ch. 6 (1997)
(Source)
Referencing Oscar Wilde from the preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890): "All art is quite useless".
LSD reveals the whatness of things, their quiddity, their essence. The wateriness of water is suddenly revealed to you, the carpetness of carpets, the woodness of wood, the yellowness of yellow, the fingernailness of fingernails, the allness of all, the nothingness of all, the allness of nothing. For me music gives access to every one of these essences of existence, but at a fraction of the social or financial cost of a drug and without the need to cry ‘Wow!’ all the time, which is one of LSD’s most distressing and least endearing side-effects.
Stephen Fry (b. 1957) British actor, writer, comedian
Moab Is My Washpot, “Joining In,” ch. 3 (1997)
(Source)
There is simply no limit to the tyrannical snobbery that otherwise decent people can descend into when it comes to music.
Stephen Fry (b. 1957) British actor, writer, comedian
Moab Is My Washpot, “Joining In,” ch. 3 (1997)
(Source)
It is a cliché that most clichés are true, but then like most clichés, that cliché is untrue.
Stephen Fry (b. 1957) British actor, writer, comedian
Moab Is My Washpot, “Joining In,” ch. 4 (1997)
(Source)
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will always hurt me. Bones mend and become actually stronger in the very place they were broken and where they have knitted up; mental wounds can grind and ooze for decades and be re-opened by the quietest whisper.
Stephen Fry (b. 1957) British actor, writer, comedian
Moab Is My Washpot, “Joining In,” ch. 4 (1997)
(Source)
You will hear things like, “Science doesn’t know everything.” Well, of course science doesn’t know everything. But because science doesn’t know everything, that doesn’t mean science knows nothing. Science knows enough for us to be watched by a few million people now on television, for these lights to be working, for quite extraordinary miracles to have taken place in terms of the harnessing of the physical world and our dim approaches towards understanding it.
A real education takes place, not in the lecture hall or library, but in the rooms of friends, with earnest frolic and happy disputation. Wine can be a wiser teacher than ink, and banter is often better than books. That was my theory at least, and I was living by it.
Stephen Fry (b. 1957) British actor, writer, comedian
The Fry Chronicles: An Autobiography, Part 1 “College to Colleague” (2012)
(Source)
Education is the sum of what students teach each other in between lectures and seminars. You sit in each other’s rooms and drink coffee — I suppose it would be vodka and Red Bull now — you share enthusiasms, you talk a lot of wank about politics, religion, art and the cosmos and then you go to bed, alone or together according to taste. I mean, how else do you learn anything, how else do you take your mind for a walk?
Stephen Fry (b. 1957) British actor, writer, comedian
The Fry Chronicles: An Autobiography, Part 1 “College to Colleague” (2012)
(Source)
Cynical is the name we give those we fear may be laughing at us.
Stephen Fry (b. 1957) British actor, writer, comedian
The Hippopotamus, ch. 4, sec. 3 [Ted] (2014)
(Source)
It’s the strange thing about this church: it is obsessed with sex, absolutely obsessed. Now they will say, we with our permissive society and our rude jokes are obsessed — no, we have a healthy attitude: we like it, it’s fun, it’s jolly. Because it’s a primary impulse, it can be dangerous and dark and difficult. It’s a bit like food in that respect, only even more exciting. The only people who are obsessed with food are anorexics and the morbidly obese, and that in erotic terms is the Catholic church in a nutshell.
Stephen Fry (b. 1957) British actor, writer, comedian
The Intelligence Squared Debate, BBC World (7 Nov 2009)
Full video.
There is no logical explanation for despair. You can no more reason yourself into cheerfulness than you can reason yourself an extra six inches in height. You can only be better prepared.
Stephen Fry (b. 1957) British actor, writer, comedian
Speech, Samaritans annual report launch, London (1996-05-17)
Regarding the emotional breakdown which led him once to abandon a play in mid-production, and subsequently again contemplate suicide. The Samaritans are a suicide-prevention group.
Quoted in Gary Younge, "Enter Fry, centre stage, for bravura performance on depression and suicide," The Guardian (1996-05-18).