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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

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I Remember Nothing Of

Stephen Fry

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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.

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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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You Are Who You Are When Nobody's Watching.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

Well, Isn't It Splendid & Rather Toffee?

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.

To Be Human And To Be Adult Means Constantly To Be In The Grip Of Opposing Emotions, To Have Daily To Reconcile Apparently Conflicting Tensions. I Want This, But Need That. I Cherish This, But I Adore Its Opposite Too.

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

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

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.

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.

It Is Possible To Be A Fan Of Reality Tv, Talent Shows And Bubblegum Pop And Still Have A Brain. You Will Also See That A Great Many People Know Perfectly Well How Silly And Camp And Trivial Their Fandom Is. They Do Not Check In Their Minds When They Enter A Fan Site. Judgement Is Not Necessarily Fled To Brutish Beasts, And Men Have Not Quite Lost Their Reason. Which Is All A Way Of Questioning Whether Pop-culture Hero Worship Is Really So Psychically Damaging, So Erosive Of Cognitive Faculties, So Corrupting Of The Soul Of Mankind As We Are So Often Told.

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.

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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I Think My View Is That Whenever You Project Into The Future You're Never Likely To Be Accurate In The Details, Or The Paraphernalia And Style. It's In The Spirit Of It.

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.

I'm A Bit Of A Coward, And Lazy, Oddly Enough.

At Least 260 Species Of Animal Have Been Noted Exhibiting Homosexual Behavior But Only One Species Of Animal Ever, So Far As We Know, Has Exhibited Homophobic Behavior - And That's The Human Being.

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.

Generally, We Admire The Thing We Are Not.

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

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

Places Of Incredible Glamour, Possibility, Power, Excitement And Pleasure. Love Your Libraries!

Entry Is Not Equivalent To Possession.

You Can Never Hope To Recapture The First Fine Careless Rapture As The Poet Put It, But It Stays With You Like A Good Acid Trip.

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?

Like Vichyssoise, Revenge Is A Dish Best Served Cold.

Animated Series

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

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

I Don't Watch Television, I Think It Destroys The Art Of Talking About Oneself.

Nature Admits No Hierarchy Of Beauty Or Usefulness Or Importance.

If I Were To Believe In A God L Would Believe In Gods. I Think Monotheism Is The Really Ghastly Thing. That Is The Absolutely Staggering To Me Misapprehension.

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?

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.

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

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

It's A Great Privilege Just To Be In A Film Not Because You're Some Packaging That Some Agent Has Done With The Studio Exec: "we Need A John Travolta Film."

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 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.

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.

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'.

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.

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.

My General View Is That Best Actor Best Suited To Role Should Get The Job. Obviously When It Comes To Colour And Issues Of Ethnicity The Choice Is Clear. But I Do Not Believe You Have To Be Transgender Or Have Undergone Sex Reassignment Surgery To Be Able Play A Character Who Has.acting Is Acting After All.

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

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

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

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.

[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!'

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I'm Fat Because I'm Greedy, And If My Mind Is Fat It's Because I'm Curious.

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

Stop Feeling Sorry For Yourself And You Will Be Happy.

Nudity Is A Deep Worry If You Have A Body Like A Bin Bag Full Of Yoghurt, Which I Have.

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.

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.

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.

Between Funny And Witty Falls The Shadow

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.

Compromise Is A Stalling Between Two Fools.

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.

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.

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'.

Supporting The English Cricket Team Is Like Supporting A Second Division Football Team. I Support Norwich City Football Team And When They Lose I Really Don't Mind Because I Expect Them To; But When We Win I'm So Happy - Much Happier Than Any Arsenal Supporter Could Ever Be.

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.

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.

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

Not One Word Of The Following Is True

I Do Like Being Surprised By Directors And Producers And Being Offered Parts I Would Never Have Considered, Including Parts That Aren't Necessarily Obvious But Which Would Test Me.

A Film Star Is A Kind Of Public Monument, And Everyone's Staring At Them, And They've Kind Of Got Railings Around Them, And They're Rather Miserable Most Of The Time.

The People I Know Who Swear The Most Tend To Have The Widest Vocabularies.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Nowadays A Lot Of What Was Wrong With Me Would No Doubt Be Ascribed To Attention Deficit Disorder, Tartrazine Food Colouring, Dairy Produce And Air Pollution. A Few Hundred Years Earlier It Would Have Been Demons, Still The Best Analogy I Think, But Not Much Help When It Comes To A Cure.

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Lion Feuchtwanger

William S. Burroughs

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