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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?

-Stephen Fry

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Great And Good Men

Stephen Fry

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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?

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But If One Could Go Back In Time, I'd Love To Have Been Directed By Howard Hawks, Who's One Of My Great Heroes. One Of The Greatest Directors There Ever Was. He Directed Probably One Of The Greatest Westerns Of All Time In 'rio Bravo'.

[...] I Suppose This Was The First Time I Had Ever Felt An Urge Not To Be. Never An Urge To Die, Far Less An Urge To Put An End To Myself - Simply An Urge Not To Be. This Disgusting, Hostile And Unlovely World Was Not Made For Me, Nor I For It. It Was Alien To Me And I To It.

You Think Homosexuality Is Disgusting? Then, It Follows As The Night The Day, That You Find Sex Disgusting, For There Is Nothing Done Between Two Men Or Two Women That Is, By Any Objective Standard, Different From That Which Is Done Between A Man And A Woman.

You Think I Have More Than Most People Dream Of? What Other People Dream Of Doesn't Matter. I Always Had Less Than I Ever Dreamt Of. All I Ever Dreamt Of Was Family. A Father And A Mother. Most People Don't Even Need To Dream Of Such Luxuries, They Take Them For Granted. That Is What I Used To Dwell On, Alone In My Bedroom. I Dwelt As All Children Do, On The Injustice. Injustice Is The Most Terrible Thing In The World, Oliver. Everything That Is Evil Springs From It And Only A Cheap Soul Can Abide It Without Anger.

There's Nothing Worse Than The British In One Of Their Fits Of Morality.

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.

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.

It Is Exhausting Knowing That Most Of The Time The Phone Rings, Most Of The Time There's An Email, Most Of The Time There's A Letter, Someone Wants Something Of You.

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.

Norwich Is A Fine City. None Finer. If There Is Another City In The United Kingdom With A School Of Painters Named After It, A Matchless Modern Art Gallery, A University With A Reputation For Literary Excellence Which Can Boast Booker Prize-winning Alumni, One Of The Grandest Romanesque Cathedrals In The World, And An Extraordinary New State-of-the-art Library Then I Have Yet To Hear Of It.

I've Always Been Aware Of My Sexuality, But I Never Quite Knew What It Meant.

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 Fulfilment

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

A Month's Salary, Deep Regret, The Telephone Number Of Some Foul Rehab Clinic And My Lance Was Free.

A University Is Not, Thank Heavens, A Place For Vocational Instruction, It Has Nothing To Do With Training For A Working Life And Career, It Is A Place For Education, Something Quite Different.

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.

Families Where There Is Not Much Laughter I Think Are Signs Of Some Sort Of Dysfunctionality Or Sickness.

Personally, I'd Never Seen A Graphic Novel. I Knew They Existed Because Friends Of Mine Like Jonathan Ross Collect Them And Some Very Literate And Intelligent People Really Rate The Graphic Novel As A Form.

My First Meeting With You Only Confirmed What I First Suspected. You Are A Fraud, A Charlatan And A Shyster. My Favourite Kind Of Person, In Fact.

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

My Father Was All Brain And Little Heart.

No Adolescent Ever Wants To Be Understood, Which Is Why They Complain About Being Misunderstood All The Time.

It Is Easy To Forget That The Most Important Aspect Of Comedy, After All, Its Great Saving Grace, Is Its Ambiguity. You Can Simultaneously Laugh At A Situation, And Take It Seriously.

This Is The Point. One Technology Doesn't Replace Another, It Complements. Books Are No More Threatened By Kindle Than Stairs By Elevators.

I Was At A Dinner Party Many Years Ago,sitting Along From Tom Stoppard, Who In Those Days Smoked Not Just Between Courses,but Between Mouthfuls. An American Woman Watched In Disbelief. "and You So Intelligent!" "excuse Me?" Said Tom "knowing Those Things Are Going To Kill You" She Said "and Still You Do It." "how Differently I Might Behave" Tom Said, "if Immortality Were An Option

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 Out

You Don't Sit Down And Write A Wish List About The Person You Are Going To Fall Violently In Love With. It Just Doesn't Work Like That.

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.

If You Know Someone Who’s Depressed, Please Resolve Never To Ask Them Why. Depression Isn’t A Straightforward Response To A Bad Situation; Depression Just Is, Like The Weather. Try To Understand The Blackness, Lethargy, Hopelessness, And Loneliness They’re Going Through. Be There For Them When They Come Through The Other Side. 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.

It's As If Scientists Exert Every Effort Of Will They Possess Deliberately To Find The Least Significant Problems In The World And Explain Them. Art Matters. Happiness Matters. Love Matters. Good Matters. Evil Matters. Slam The Fridge Door. They Are The Only Things That Matter And They Are Of Course Precisely The Things That Science Goes Out Of Its Way To Ignore.

That's Alright," Said Hugo. "i've Got Some Wine" Which Was About All He Seemed To Have. He Poured Out Two Mugfuls. "very Nice," Said Adrian, Sipping Appreciatively. "i Wonder How They Got The Cat To Sit On The Bottle." "it's Cheap, That's The Main Thing.

I Certainly Don't Want To Be Formulaic. I Want To Be Honest And Authentic And Everything Else.

The Concept That Really Gets The Goat Of The Gay-hater, The Idea That Really Spins Their Melon And Sickens Their Stomachs Is That Most Terrible And Terrifying Of All Human Notions, Love. That One Can Love Another Of The Same Gender, That Is What The Homophobe Really Cannot Stand. Love In All Eight Tones And All Five Semitones Of The World's Full Octave. Love As Agape, Eros And Philos; Love As Infatuation, Obsession And Lust; Love As Torture, Euphoria, Ecstasy And Oblivion (this Is Beginning To Read Like A Calvin Klein Perfume Catalogue); Love As Need, Passion And Desire.

I Think The Fact That I'm So Well Known To Be Gay Makes It Very Difficult To Have A Convincing Relationship With A Woman On Screen. It Wouldn't Be At All Difficult For Me To Kiss A Woman - I'll Kiss A Frog If You Like.

Life Is Sometimes Novel-shaped, Mocking The Efforts Of Those Authors Who, In An Effort To Make Their Novels Life-shaped, Spurn The Easy Symmetry And Cheap Resonance Of Reality.

I Believe That Poetry Is A Primal Impulse Within Us All.

I Suppose The Thing That Really Interests Me Is What Mankind Did With The Big, Big, Big Discoveries That Have Created Our Modern Age.

Money And Fame Are Trashy And Don't Guarantee Happiness, But We All Refuse Really To Know It.

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

Come Back, And Do That Thing, Be Lovely To Each-other.

If There Is A Sort Of National American Emotion I Would Call It Optimism. If There Is An English One I Would Call It Embarrassment - Not Even Pessimism - Just Sheer Shame, Embarrassment And Confusion.

One Of The Most Unattractive Human Traits, And So Easy To Fall Into, Is Resentment At The Sudden Shared Popularity Of A Previously Private Pleasure. Which Of Us Hasn't Been Annoyed When A Band, Writer, Artist Or Television Series That Had Been A Minority Interest Of Ours Has Suddenly Achieved Mainstream Popularity? When It Was At A Cult Level We Moaned At The Philistinism Of A World That Didn't Appreciate It, And Now That They Do Appreciate It We're All Resentful And Dog-in-the-manger About It.

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

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.

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.

There Can't Be That Many Individual Souls. Not Souls Like Mine. There Isn't Room. There Can't Be.

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.

I Like To Think Of Myself At Home In The Armchair, Writing, Smoking And Occasionally Wandering Down The Shop.

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.

I Get An Urge, Like A Pregnant Elephant, To Go Away And Give Birth To A Book.

Hell, I Am Young. I Am Free. My Teeth Are Clean. The Sun Shines. To Hell With Everything Else

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.

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.

But Happiness Is No Respecter Of Persons.

I Think Faith In Each Other Is Much Harder Than Faith In God...

There Is Simply No Limit To The Tyrannical Snobbery That Otherwise Decent People Can Descend Into When It Comes To Music.

Philosophy Is An Odd Thing. When We Use The Word In Everyday Speech, You Know, You Sometimes Hear It Hilariously.

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.

I Gather A Repulsive Nobody Writing In A Paper No One Of Any Decency Would Be Seen Dead With Has Written Something Loathesome And Inhumane.

Like Vichyssoise, Revenge Is A Dish Best Served Cold.

Animated Series

Old Professors Never Die, They Just Lose Their Faculties.

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

...as Absurd And Dishonest As Claiming That The Trouble With Computer Games Is That They Stop People Watching Television.

All The Big Words -virtue, Justice, Truth, ...- Are Dwarfed By The Greatness Of Kindness

Literature Is The Only Access To Truth We Have On This Planet.

My First Words, As I Was Being Born [...] I Looked Up At My Mother And Said, 'that's The Last Time I'm Going Up One Of Those.

Estate Agents: Like Them Or Loathe Them, You'd Be Mad Not To Loathe Them.

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.

Enthusiats Are Used To Being Mocked, Maligned And Misunderstood. We Don't Really Mind.

My Parents Were Marvelously Educated People.

Estate Agents. You Can't Live With Them, You Can't Live With Them. The First Sign Of These Nasty Purulent Sores Appeared Round About 1894. With Their Jangling Keys, Nasty Suits, Revolting Beards, Moustaches And Tinted Spectacles, Estate Agents Roam The Land Causing Perturbation And Despair. If You Try And Kill Them, You're Put In Prison: If You Try And Talk To Them, You Vomit. There's Only One Thing Worse Than An Estate Agent But At Least That Can Be Safely Lanced, Drained And Surgically Dressed. Estate Agents. Love Them Or Loathe Them, You'd Be Mad Not To Loathe Them.

I've Never Had Any Illusions About Being A Lead Actor In Films, Because Lead Actors Have To Be Of A Certain Kind. Apart From The Beauty Of Looks And Figure, Which I Cannot Claim To Have, There's Just A Particular Kind Of Ordinary-joe Quality That A Film Star Needs To Have.

Living With Bipolar, Schizophrenia Or Any Other Mental Condition Takes A Recognition That One Has A Chronic Condition That Needs Managing. The Management Can Be Through Pharmaceutical Intervention, Talk Therapy, Mindfulness Programmes, Diet And Exercise Changes, All Kinds Of Things.

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.

It Does Not Suit The World To Hear That People Who Are Leading A High Life, An Enviable Life, A Privileged Life Are As Miserable Most Days As Anybody Else, Despite The Fact That It Must Be Obvious They Would Be - Given That We Are All Agreed That Money And Fame Do Not Bring Happiness. Instead The World Would Prefer To Enjoy The Idea, Against What It Knows To Be True, That Wealth And Fame Do In Fact Insulate And Protect Against Misery And It Would Rather We Shut Up If We Are Planning To Indicate Otherwise.

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... Essence

There Is So Much We Can Learn From Tv. It's A Window On The World.

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

And Then I Saw Him And Nothing Was Ever The Same Again. The Sky Was Never The Same Colour, The Moon Never The Same Shape: The Air Never Smelt The Same, Food Never Tasted The Same. Every Word I Knew Changed Its Meaning, Everything That Once Was Stable And Firm Became As Insubstantial As A Puff Of Wind, And Every Puff Of Wind Became A Solid Thing I Could Feel And Touch.

Generally, We Admire The Thing We Are Not.

My Life, At Least, Is Divided Between Writing And Performing And Mixtures Of The Two.

A Book Is Judged, Not By Its Reference To Life, But By Its Reference To Other Books.

Sometimes There Just Isn't Enough Vomit In The World.

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.

I Was Happy There. Which Is To Say I Was Not Unhappy There. Unhappiness And Happiness I Have Always Been Able To Carry About With Me, Irrespective Of Place And People, Because I Have Never Joined In.

You Don't Get Depressed Because Bad Things Happen To You. That's Getting Pissed Off And Annoyed. That's Reasonable. Someone Hits You In The Face You Go Ow, You Know That's... But Depression Is Something That Happens Like Weather To You Inside You.

I Really Do Believe That There Are Those Who Would Like And Trust Me Better If They Saw Me Weeping Into A Whisky, Making A Fool Of Myself, Getting Aggressive, Maudlin And Drunkenly Out Of Control. I Have Never Found Those States In Others Anything Other Than Tiring, Awkward, Embarrassing And Fantastically Dull, But I Am Quite Sure That People Would Cherish A View Of Me In That Condition At Least Once In A While.

Glory Never Arrives Through The Front Door. She Sneaks In Uninvited Round The Back Or Through An Upstairs Window While You Are Sleeping.

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.

I Think We Have All Experienced Passion That Is Not In Any Sense Reasonable.

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 You

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.

I Must Brave The Interior Of The Most Tawdry And Literally Trumpery Tower Of Them All ... The Trump Taj Mahal. For Taking The Name Of The Priceless Mausoleum Of Agra, One Of The Beauties And Wonders Of The World, For That Alone Donald Trump Should Be Stripped Naked And Whipped With Scorpions Along The Boardwalk.- It Is As If A Giant Toad Has Raped A Butterfly.

There Is Something In The American Project, Something In Simple American Oratory, Something In The Hope And Idealism Of This Frustrating And Contradictory Nation That Still Makes My Spirits Soar And My Heart Leap With Optimism And Belief. If Only They Understood How To Make A Cup Of Tea.

If You Know Someone Who's Depressed, Please Resolve Never To Ask Them Why. Depression Isn't A Straightforward Response To A Bad Situation; Depression Just Is, Like The Weather.

Being Depressed

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

It's Certainly Easy To Mock Some Things ... Oddly Enough Though I've Never Found It Easy To Mock Anything Of Value. Only Things That Are Tawdry And Fatuous - Perhaps It's Just Me.

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".

Literary Studies Were No More Than A Series Of Autopsies Performed By Heartless Technicians. Worse Than Autopsies: Biopsies. Vivisection. Even Movies, Which I Love More Than Anything, More Than Life Itself, They Even Do It With Movies These Days.

You Are Who You Are When Nobody's Watching.

Great Writers, I Discovered, Were Not To Be Bowed Down Before And Worshipped, But Embraced And Befriended. Their Names Resounded Through History Not Because They Had Massive Brows And Thought Deep Incomprehensible Thoughts, But Because They Opened Windows In The Mind, They Put Their Arms Round You And Showed You Things You Always Knew But Never Dared To Believe. Even If Their Names Were Terrifyingly Foreign And Intellectual Sounding, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire Or Cavafy, They Turned Out To Be Charming And Wonderful And Quite Unalarming After All.

Many People Would No More Think Of Entering Journalism Than The Sewage Business - Which At Least Does Us All Some Good.

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.

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?

You've Just Had The Most Imponderable Joy Of Watching Charlieissocoollike, Which Makes You, Like, Cool.

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.

Moving From Chair To Chair, From Coffee Machine To Coffee Machine Is The Limit Of My Action In Most Films. But I Enjoy Being Cast In Them Because I Love Watching Them.

As Someone Who Worked Hard For A Labour Victory In The 90s, Do I Regret It? Not Really. It Was Bound To Happen. And It'll Happen With The Next Government, And The One After It. Because All Governments Serve Us. They Serve The Filth.

There's No Doubt That I Do Have Extremes Of Mood That Are Greater Than Just About Anybody Else I Know.

I Am A Lover Of Truth, A Worshipper Of Freedom, A Celebrant At The Altar Of Language And Purity And Tolerance.

We Hold On Steve's Still Smiling Face As Michael Passes By. Steve's Eyes Follow Michael Out Of The Room And Then The Smile Disappears. It Is Replaced By A Look Of Hunger And Desolation.

Picture This Scene. A Critic Arrives At The Gates Of Heaven. 'and What Did You Do?' Asks Saint Peter. 'well', Says The Dead Soul. 'i Criticised Things'. 'i Beg Your Pardon?' 'you Know, Other People Wrote Things, Performed Things, Painted Things And I Said Stuff Like, "thin And Unconvincing", "turgid And Uninspired", "competent And Serviceable,"...you Know'.

I Like To Wake Up Each Morning And Not Know What I Think, That I May Reinvent Myself In Some Way.

I Will Defend The Absolute Value Of Mozart Over Miley Cyrus, Of Course I Will, But We Should Be Wary Of False Dichotomies. You Do Not Have To Choose Between One Or The Other. You Can Have Both. The Human Cultural Jungle Should Be As Varied And Plural As The Amazonian Rainforest. We Are All Richer For Biodiversity. We May Decide That A Puma Is Worth More To Us Than A Caterpillar, But Surely We Can Agree That The Habitat Is All The Better For Being Able To Sustain Each.

We Humans Are Naturally Disposed To Worship Gods And Heroes, To Build Our Pantheons And Valhallas. I Would Rather See That Impulse Directed Into The Adoration Of Daft Singers, Thicko Footballers And Air-headed Screen Actors Than Into The Veneration Of Dogmatic Zealots, Fanatical Preachers, Militant Politicians And Rabid Cultural Commentators.

The Point About Manic Depression Or Bipolar Disorder, As It's Now More Commonly Called, Is That It's About Mood Swings. So, You Have An Elevated Mood. When People Think Of Manic Depression, They Only Hear The Word Depression. They Think One's A Depressive. The Point Is, One's A Manic-depressive.

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.

When Push-off Comes To Shove-off, A Man Must Have A Reason To Get Out Of Bed In The Mornings, Something More Than The Threat Of Bedsores, At Any Rate.

What Other Developed Democracy Has Such A Ridiculous And Squalid History Of Intolerance? From The Imprisonment And Roasting Of Heretics, Witches And Poachers, To The Censorship Of Literature, Art And Television: From St Alban Through Wilde, Joyce And Lawrence I Think We Can Point With Pride To As Grim A Catalogue Of Intemperate, Bigoted Repression As Any Nation On Earth.

Entry Is Not Equivalent To Possession.

I Have To Mime At Parties When Everyone Sings Happy Birthday... Mime Or Mumble And Rumble And Growl And Grunt So Deep That Only Moles, Manta Rays And Mushrooms Can Hear Me.

When You Take A Lot Of Cocaine Powder You Tend To Take A Lot Of Alcohol With It As Well, So For Many Years Really I Never Went Out Without At Least Four Or Five Grams Of Cocaine Powder.

Stop Feeling Sorry For Yourself And You Will Be Happy.

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?

I'm Afraid I Was Very Much The Traditionalist. I Went Down On One Knee And Dictated A Proposal Which My Secretary Faxed Over Straight Away.

Choking With Dry Tears And Raging, Raging, Raging At The Absolute Indifference Of Nature And The World To The Death Of Love, The Death Of Hope And The Death Of Beauty, I Remember Sitting On The End Of My Bed, Collecting These Pills And Capsules Together And Wondering Why, Why When I Felt I Had So Much To Offer, So Much Love, Such Outpourings Of Love And Energy To Spend On The World, I Was Incapable Of Being Offered Love, Giving It Or Summoning The Energy With Which I Knew I Could Transform Myself And Everything Around Me.

The Performance Of Buggery Is No More Inevitable A Part Of Homosexuality Than An Orange Syllabub Is An Inevitable Part Of A Dinner: Some May Clamour For It And Instantly Demand A Second Helping, Some Are Not Interested, Some Decide They Will Try It Once And Then Instantly Vomit.

I Now Accept That It Is Looking Increasingly Likely That Tiger Woods Is, In Fact, Straight.

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

I Can Understand The Greek Idea That There Are These These Principles Of Lightening Or Of War Or Of Wisdom And To Embody Them, To Personify Them Into A Athena Or Aries Or Whichever God You Want Makes Enormous Sense.

If There Were A God He Would Want Us To Be Better Spirited Than To Take His Word For Everything.

There Is No Reason Why Anyone Should Understand How It Works… And Of Course No Reason Why Anyone Should Care … Unless You Are Curious, In Which Case I Love You, For Curiosity About The World And All Its Corners Is A Beautiful Thing.

History Is Not The Story Of Strangers, Aliens From Another Realm; It Is The Story Of Us Had We Been Born A Little Earlier. History Is Memory; We Have To Remember What It Is Like To Be A Roman, Or A Jacobite Or A Chartist Or Even - If We Dare, And We Should Dare - A Nazi. History Is Not Abstraction, It Is The Enemy Of Abstraction.

You Should Give Up.' 'why?' 'for One Thing, You'll Live Longer.' 'oh, You Don't Live Longer. It Just Seems Longer.

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

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.

It Was As If He Grew His Hair Long And Smoked Cigarettes Because He Liked To, Not Because He Liked Being Seen To. This Was Dangerously Subversive.

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.

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.'

I Feel I Would Love To Close Down For A Number Of Years In Some Way And Just Be In The Country Making Pork Pies And Chutneys And Never Have To Poke My Head Out Of The Parapet.

Sex Without Smiling Is As Sickly And As Base As Vodka And Tonic Without Ice.

I May Have Looked Happy But Inside I Was Hopelessly Depressed.

I've Always Believed That Everything That Is Said From Authority Is Either The Authority Of One's Own Heart, One's Own Brain, One's Own Reading, One's Own Trust, But Not The Authority Of Someone Who Claims It Because They're Speaking For God And They Know The Truth Because It's Written In A Book. That, Essentially, Is Where I Come From. In A Sense, Tolerance Is My Religion. Reason Is My Religion.

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

I Have A Dark And Dreadful Secret. I Write Poetry... I Believe Poetry Is A Primal Impulse Within All Of Us. I Believe We Are All Capable Of It And Furthermore That A Small, Often Ignored Corner Of Us Positively Yearns To Try It.

I Think People Talk About One Love, But There Is The Need To Love And The Need To Be Loved Are Not The Same Thing And I Suppose That's... And It's Working That Out Is Part Of Growing Up.

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

Taste Every Fruit Of Every Tree In The Garden At Least Once. It Is An Insult To Creation Not To Experience It Fully. Temperance Is Wickedness.

I Flicked My Eyes Over To Steve Again And Saw Him Straighten. He Would Need A Diversion Just To Start. “explanations?” I Bellowed. “explanations? There’s Your Explanation…there!” I Stabbed A Finger Dramatically Towards The Far Corner Of The Room. Pathetic, Really. I Mean, Talk About The Oldest Trick In The Book. But It’s A Good Book, And The Trick Would Have Been Cut From Subsequent Editions If It Didn’t Sometimes Work.

I Found It All About As Arousing As A Tupperware Party.

What Makes A Good Family? Well, I Suppose Obviously Love. Love Lubricated Often I Think By Humor. I Think A Family That Can Laugh At Each Other And Tease Themselves And Who Are Able To Be Jolly With Each Other I Think Is The Key.

In A Dung Heap, Even A Plastic Bead Can Gleam Like A Sapphire.

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.

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

The Most Natural Way You Would Attempt To Cope With Something Inside You That Is Affecting Your Moods And Your Energy Levels Is To Intervene With Chemicals To Help And Because Medical Science Hasn't Come Up With Pharmaceuticals That Do Particularly Well You Tend To Reach For The Chemicals That Are Outside The Pharma Counter, I.e. Narcotics And Alcohol Because They Can Guarantee Your Mood More Or Less.

I Never Quite Dare To Believe I'm Brave Enough To Be An Artist, But I'm On The Side Of Artists. I Think Of Myself As A Bit Of A Salieri, Looking With Longing Eyes At Mozart.

I Was Born Mary Patterson, But Then I Married And Naturally Took My Husband's Name, So Now I'm Neil Patterson.

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.

Hey-ho, It's Raining Inside: It Isn't My Fault And There's Nothing I Can Do About It, But Sit It Out. But The Sun May Well Come Out Tomorrow And When It Does, I Shall Take Full Advantage.

Atheism Comes Into Rather A Bad Press And I Suppose I'd Rather Describe Myself As A Humanist... I Don't Believe In God. I Don't Believe There Is A God.

People Still Don't Get How Astounding Darwinism Is. People Think What Shocked Everybody Was That Charles Darwin Seemed To Be Saying We Had Descended From Apes.

[on Libraries] What's Great About Them Is That Anybody Can Go Into Them And Find A Book And Borrow It Free Of Charge And Read It. They Don't Have To Steal It From A Bookshop... You Know When You're Young, You're Growing Up, They're Almost Sexually Exciting Places Because Books Are Powerhouses Of Knowledge, And Therefore They're Kind Of Slightly Dark And Dangerous. You See Books That Kind Of Make You Go 'oh!'

Knowing What I Now Know I Would Never Have Done Anything So Fatuous; But Then I Never Would Have Known What I Know Now Had I Not.

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 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 Verbs

Language Development

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

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.

Where Lgbt And Mental Health Issues Collide Is Over Stigma. And Stigma Is Society's Problem Not The Problem Of The Lgbt Or Mental Health Community. What We Have To Deal With Is The Ignorance, Fear And Prejudice That Blight The Lives Of Those Who Have Nothing Wrong With Them In Any Moral Or Transgressive Sense. It Is Society That Is Ill.

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

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.

I Think I'm Most Nervous About Revealing How Nervous I Have Always Been. People Think Me Calm, Confident, Poised. Inside I'm A Jelly.

Somehow, As A Writer, You Tend To Use Words To Paper Over Structural Cracks.

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.

It's Now Very Common To Hear People Say 'i'm Rather Offended By That'.

Freedom Of Speech

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.

Seriousness Is No More A Guarantee Of Truth, Insight, Authenticity Or Probity, Than Humour Is A Guarantee Of Superficiality And Stupidity.

We Are Not Nouns, We Are Verbs. I Am Not A Thing - An Actor, A Writer - I Am A Person Who Does Things - I Write, I Act - And I Never Know What I'm Going To Do Next. I Think You Can Be Imprisoned If You Think Of Yourself As A Noun.

Money Is To Everything As An Aeroplane Is To Australia. The Aeroplane Isn't Australia, But It Remains The Only Practical Way We Know Of Reaching It. So Perhaps, Metonymically, The Aeroplane Is Australia After All.

I Said It Before And I’ll Say It Again: Books Are Dead, Plays Are Dead, Poems Are Dead: There’s Only Movies. Music Is Still Okay, Because Music Is Sound Track. Ten, Fifteen Years Ago, Every Arts Student Wanted To Be A Novelist Or A Playwright. I’d Be Amazed If You Could Find A Single One Now With Such A Dead-end Ambition. They All Want To Make Movies. Not Write Movies. You Don’t Write Movies. You Make Movies.

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.

Life, That Can Shower You With So Much Splendour, Is Unremittingly Cruel To Those Who Have Given Up.

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

The Only People Who Are Obsessed With Food Are Anorexics And The Morbidly Obese. That, In Erotic Terms, Is The Catholic Church, In A Nutshell.

Mankind Can Live Free In A Society Hemmed In By Laws, But We Have Yet To Find A Historical Example Of Mankind Living Free In Lawless Anarchy.

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.

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.

I Have Van Gogh's Ear For Music

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 Rigged It Up So That At Exactly 7:30 Every Morning It Falls From The Ceiling Onto My Face.

Well, Isn't It Splendid & Rather Toffee?

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 Language

One Of The Most Intensely Unlikeable Figures Of The Twentieth Century, Fanatical Anti-semite, Enemy Of Labour Unions And Proud Recipient Of Medals From Nazi Germany, Where Hitler Held Him In Veneration, Henry Ford Was Also An Employer Who Paid His Workers More Than His Competitors, An Innovator Who Pioneered The Assembly Line And A Visionary Whose Part In The Creation Of The Twentieth Century Was So Great That Aldous Huxley, In His Brave New World, Prefigured A Society Whose Calendar Was Divided Into Bf And Af-before Ford And After Ford.

Brave New World

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.

You Can Act In Five, Six, Or Seven Films In The Time It Takes To Direct One Film.

How Can One Not Be Fond Of Something That The Daily Mail Despises?

Weather Is Real. It Is Absolutely Real: When It Rains, It Rains – You Get Wet, There Is No Question About It. It Is Also True About Weather That You Can’t Control It; You Can’t Say If I Wish Hard Enough It Won’t Rain. It Is Equally True That If The Weather Is Bad One Day It Will Get Better And What I Had To Learn Was To Treat My Moods Like The Weather.

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