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At John Schlesinger's Funeral At A Synagogue In St John's Wood Some Years Ago The Person I Stood Next To Said To Me Encouragingly, 'come On, Stephen - You're Not Singing. Have A Go!' 'believe Me, Paul, You Don't Want Me To,' I Said. Besides, I Was Having A Much Better Time Listening To Him. 'no. Go On!' So I Joined In The Chorus. 'you're Right,' Paul Mccartney Conceded. 'you Can't Sing.

-Stephen Fry

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At John Schlesinger's Funeral

Stephen Fry

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At John Schlesinger's Funeral At A Synagogue In St John's Wood Some Years Ago The Person I Stood Next To Said To Me Encouragingly, 'come On, Stephen - You're Not Singing. Have A Go!' 'believe Me, Paul, You Don't Want Me To,' I Said. Besides, I Was Having A Much Better Time Listening To Him. 'no. Go On!' So I Joined In The Chorus. 'you're Right,' Paul Mccartney Conceded. 'you Can't Sing.

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If You Go Looking For Loonies And Religious Fanatics And Dropouts And Freaks, I Dare Say You'll Find It.

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All The Cold-reading Clairvoyants And The Nonsensical Astrologers And Absurd Esp Merchants And Other Such People Who Talk About Vibrations And Energies.... God, If There's A Word That Drives Me Mad It's "energy" Used In A Nonsensical Way-don't Get Me Started!

How Dare You? How Dare You Create A World In Which There Is Such Misery That Is Not Our Fault? It's Not Right, It's Utterly, Utterly Evil. Why Should I Respect A Capricious, Mean-minded, Stupid God Who Creates A World That Is So Full Of Injustice And Pain?

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If Ignorance Is Bliss, Why Aren't There More Happy People In The World?

Most Of The Problem I See Amongst Friends And I've Experienced Amongst Myself Is When People Haven't Accommodated The Inequality That They Want, They Haven't Understood That Their Partner Wants To Give More Love And Receive Less Or They Haven't Understood That Their Partner Wants To Receive More, But Sort Of Give Less.

Having Been An Actor And A Writer For So Long - 20 Years Or So - I Felt That It Would Be Daft To Go To One's Grave Without Having Directed. It's A Natural Extension Of Writing And Acting, And So I Knew It Would Happen One Day.

When Steampunk Meets Adventure And Adventure Meets Comedy And Comedy Meets Ingenuity And Ingenuity Meets Charm And Charm Meets Wonder And Wonder Meets Pleasure The Result Is A Triumph. Dr Grordbort Is The Future. And The Past. Which Makes An Ideal Present.

One Of The Traps Of Adolescence Is The Sort Of Paranoid Resentment That Somehow You're Never Going To Match Up And That Everybody Else's Life Is Going To Be Better And Finer And Fuller. That Everyone Else Attended Some Secret Lesson In Which How To Live Was Taught And You Had A Dental Appointment That Day, Or You Were Somehow Not Invited. And The Point Of Great Writers Like Wilde Is That They Make That Invitation To You.

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.

Because, Let's Face It, I Do Not Get Offered The Parts That Brad Pitt Has Just Turned Down.

We Always Make The Mistake, The Fatal Mistake In The Case Of Military People, Of Imagining That Each War Will Be A Kind Of Version Of The One That Happened Previously.

The English Language Is Like London: Proudly Barbaric Yet Deeply Civilised, Too, Common Yet Royal, Vulgar Yet Processional, Sacred Yet Profane.

Self Pity Is The Worst Possible Emotion Anyone Can Have. And The Most Destructive. It Is, To Slightly Paraphrase What Wilde Said About Hatred, And I Think Actually Hatred's A Subset Of Self Pity And Not The Other Way Around - 'it Destroys Everything Around It, Except Itself.'

If You Think You're Going To Have An Eternity In Which You Can Talk To Mozart And Chopin And Schopenhauer On A Cloud And Learn Stuff And You Know Really Get To Grips With Knowledge And Understanding And So You Won't Bother Now, I Think It's A Terrible, A Terrible Mistake.

When You've Seen A Nude Infant Doing A Backward Somersault You Know Why Clothing Exists.

It Is A Cliche That Most Cliches Are True, But Then Like Most Cliches, That Cliche Is Untrue.

I Knew I Couldn't Believe In God, Because I Was Fundamentally Hellenic In My Outlook.

Well, Isn't It Splendid & Rather Toffee?

Nothing In This World Is At It Seems. Except, Possibly, Porridge.

You Can't Just Say There Is A God Because The World Is Beautiful. You Have To Account For Bone Cancer In Children

If You Are Hungry For Food, You Are Prepared To Hunt High And Low For It. If You Are Hungry For Information It Is The Same. Information Is All Around Us, Now More Than Ever Before In Human History. You Barely Have To Stir Or Incommode Yourself To Find Things Out. The Only Reason People Do Not Know Much Is Because They Do Not Care To Know. They Are Incurious. Incuriosity Is The Oddest And Most Foolish Failing There Is.

The Only Reason People Do Not Know Much Is Because They Do Not Care To Know. They Are Incurious. Incuriousity Is The Oddest And Most Foolish Failing There Is.

After The Shooting Of John Lennon And The Early Death Of So Many Great Stars And The Utter Naked Venal Mercantile Marketing Of Pop Music And Rock Music, I Don't Think Anyone Really Believes That Music Is Anything More Than Another Commodity.

Money No Longer Has Any Meaning. Civilization Is Coming To An End. If Not The Destruction Of The World, It's An Endless Stalemate.

First Love Is Unrequited Ultimately Because It’s So Huge.it’s Such An Act Of Giving And It Requires So Much Back That It Can Never Be Given Back. It’s Like An Atom Bomb. It’s Like… It’s All The Energy Of Who You Are And Who You Want To Be And What You Love And What You Hope To Be Explodes. It Is Impossible For A Single... Human Being To Offer That Back To You In A Mutual Way.

The Stranger Might Laugh And Seem To Enjoy The Writing, But You Hug To Yourself The Thought That They Didn't Quite Understand Its Force And Quality The Way You Do - Just As Your Friends (thank Heavens) Don't Also Fall In Love With The Person You Are Going On And On About To Them.

Falling In Love

People Sometimes Accuse Me Of Knowing A Lot. "stephen," They Say, Accusingly, "you Know A Lot." This Is A Bit Like Telling A Person Who Has A Few Grains Of Sand Clinging To Him That He Owns Much Sand. When You Consider The Vast Amount Of Sand There Is In The World Such A Person Is, To All Intents And Purposes, Sandless. We Are All Sandless. We Are All Ignorant. There Are Beaches And Deserts And Dunes Of Knowledge Whose Existance We Have Never Even Guessed At, Let Alone Visited.

There Are Some Things I Don't Like, About Which I Think, Well, That's Me. But Coriander Is A Giant Hoax Perpetrated By A Perverted Society.

Great And Good Men And Women Stirred Sugar Into Their Coffee Knowing That It Had Been Picked By Slaves. Kind, Good Ancestors Of All Of Us Never Questioned Hangings, Burnings, Tortures, Inequality, Suffering And Injustice That Today Revolt Us. If We Dare To Presume To Damn Them With Our Fleeting Ideas Of Morality, Then We Risk Damnation From Our Descendants For Whatever It Is That We Are Doing That Future History Will Judge As Intolerable And Wicked: Eating Meat, Driving Cars, Appearing On Tv, Visiting Zoos, Who Knows?

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. Not Magical Power, But Real Power. The Power Simply To Go On, The Power To Endure, That Is Power Enough, But I Felt I Had Also The Power To Create, To Add, To Delight, To Amaze And To Transform.

All We Have To Do Is Listen. The Good Lord Gave Us Two Ears And Only One Mouth, My Dear White-headed Mother Used To Say.

As Children Everyone Thinks Their Family Is Weird And They're Upset By The Weirdness Of Their Own Family.

Cheat? Good Heavens, This Is An Amateur Cricket Match Amongst Leading Prep Schools, I'm An Englishman And A Schoolmaster Supposedly Setting An Example To His Young Charges. We Are Playing The Most Artistic And Beautiful Game Ever Devised. Of Course I'll Cunting Well Cheat. Now, Give Me My Robe And Put On My Crown. I Have Immortal Longings In Me.

You Can't Reason Yourself Back Into Cheerfulness Any More Than You Can Reason Yourself Into An Extra Six Inches In Height.

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.

Now, Bipolar Disorder, It Goes On A Spectrum. There's Very Severe Conditions Of It And There Are Milder Ones. I'm Lucky Enough That It's Reasonably Mild In My Case.

Part Of Life Is Learning What To Be Ashamed Of And What To Be Proud Of.

I Think Eros Should Be Dirty. In Greek Legend, As I'm Sure You Are Aware, He Fell In Love With The Minor Deity Psyche. It Was The Greek Way Of Saying That, In Spite Of What It May Believe, Love Pursues The Soul, Not The Body; The Erotic Desires The Psychic. If Love Was Clean And Wholesome He Wouldn't Lust After Psyche.

The Service Took Place On One Of Those Afternoons That Occur Only In The Past.

I Have Van Gogh's Ear For Music

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.

Wit Can Be Beautiful, Because It Expresses And Distills An Idea.

Simon Gray, I Decided When I First Witnessed This Frog Into Prince Transformation, Did Not Have A Drinking Problem. He Had A Drinking Solution.

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 Fulfilment.

Humanism Is An Approach To Life Which Encourages Ethical And Fulfilling Living On The Basis Of Reason And Humanity, And Rejects Superstition And Religion. The Most Immediate Impact Of Living As A Humanist Is That We Believe This Life Is All There Is - So What We Do And The Choices We Make Really Count.

I Met Too Frankly Preposterous, If It Weren't For Their Banal Evil, Politicians And Pastors Who Told Knowing Lies About The Evils Of Homosexuality In Order To Attract Bigger Flocks To Their Churches And More Votes And Power To Their Corrupt Councils. Lgbt People Seem To Be Being Scapegoated More And More Just As At The Same Time In More Enlightened Countries More And More Freedom To Express Themselves, Marry, Be Given Official Intersex Status And So On Is Offered.

But Happiness Is No Respecter Of Persons.

I Am Magnificently Prepared For The Long Littleness Of Life. There Is Diddley-squat For Me To Look Forward To. Zilch, Zero, Zip-all, Sweet Lipperty-pipperty Nothing. The Only Thought That Will Give Me The Energy To Carry On Is That Someone Has A Life Which Would Be Diminished By My Departure From It.

Cynical Is The Name We Give Those We Fear May Be Laughing At Us.

That One Can Love Another Of The Same Gender, That Is What The Homophobe Really Cannot Stand.

We Don't Stop Talking About How The World Might Be Better Just Because We Have No Chance Of Making It To Prime Minister. We Are All Politicians. We Are All Artists. In An Open Society Everything The Mind And Hands Can Achieve Is Our Birthright. It Is Up To Us To Claim It.

An Original Idea. That Can't Be Too Hard. The Library Must Be Full Of Them.

I Went To Cambridge And Thought I Would Stay There. I Thought I Would Quietly Grow Tweed In A Corner Somewhere And Become A Don Or Something.

Naturally I've Known Girlies Form An Attachment To The Younger Male Before Now, But In The Tennis Score Of The Bedroom Most Girls In My Experience Would Rather Love Thirty Or Love Forty Than Love Fifteen. Men, Of Course, Are A Whole Other Issue; They Start At Love All And Stay There Until They're Dragged From The Court

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Georgina Chapman

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