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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.

-Stephen Fry

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Nowadays A Lot Of

Stephen Fry

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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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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.

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.

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.

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.

[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!'

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

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.

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.

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.

I Suppose That There Is No Point Wasting Time Being Lazy, Though Of Course Indolence In A Divine Way, Actually Has Its Advantages.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

You Don't Need A Harvard Mba To Know That The Bedroom And The Boardroom Are Just Two Sides Of The Same Ballgame.

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.

There Is No Right Language Or Wrong Language Any More Than There Are Right Or Wrong Clothes.

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

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

...the Reality Of Intelligent British Speech... Uses Blasphemus, Coital And Cloacal Expletives As A Matter Of Course.

You Either Get Norfolk, With Its Wild Roughness And Uncultivated Oddities, Or You Don't. It's Not All Soft And Lovely. It Doesn't Ask To Be Loved.

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.

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.

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.'

The Most Important Philosophy I Think Is That Even If It Isn't True You Must Absolutely Assume There Is No Afterlife.

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!

No, I Love The Idea That Someone Changes. As An Actor It's Always The Thing That You Look For. He Is Someone Who Starts Off Bright, Cheerful And Confident And Then Has Everything Taken Away From Him. It's A Wonderful Journey To Take.

Christmas To A Child Is The First Terrible Proof That To Travel Hopefully Is Better Than To Arrive.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Perhaps The Greatest Definition I Think Of Character And Quality Is People Who When They're Truly Great Rather Than Making You Feel That Tall They Make You Feel That Tall, That They're Greatness As It Were Improves You.

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.

My Parents Were Marvelously Educated People.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Philosophy Is An Odd Thing... There Is No Particular Socratic Or Dimechian Or Kantian Way To Live Your Life. They Don't Offer Ethical Codes And Standards By Which To Live Your Life.

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

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

Self-consciousness, That's What It Is. Always My Abiding Vice. I Keep Seeing Myself. Me Watching Myself Watching Others Watch Me. How Do You Lose That? What's The Trick?

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.

Generally, We Admire The Thing We Are Not.

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.

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

Oh, It Takes A Lot For Me To Walk Out Of A Film.

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

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.

Lectures Broke Into One's Day And Were Clearly A Terrible Waste Of Time, Necessary No Doubt If You Were Reading Law Or Medicine Or Some Other Vocational Subject, But In The Case Of English, The Natural Thing To Do Was Talk A Lot, Listen To Music, Drink Coffee And Wine, Read Books, And Go To Plays, Perhaps Be In Plays.

The Gay News Critic Wrote That I 'carried The Lilt Of The Irish Without The Brogue'.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

Like Vichyssoise, Revenge Is A Dish Best Served Cold.

Animated Series

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.

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.

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.

Things Are Always Worse In The Steady Watches Of The Night.

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

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

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.

Compromise Is A Stalling Between Two Fools.

Humanism Inspires A Lot Of Enthusiasm For Everyday Life And Urges People To Be Better To One Another, To Work Towards A Better Future And A Common Good. If I Believed There Was An Afterlife I Would Have So Much Less Motive For Filling This Life With Every Experience That Is Offered Up To Me.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Freedom Of Speech

I Believe In Kindness And Niceness And Lots Of Spiritual Things, But The Real Intellectual Rigor And Quest Of Logic Is Something That I'm Afraid Takes Incredibly Hard Work And We Live In An Age In Which Hard Work Is If Not Actively Deprecated Or Denigrated It Is Run Away From Or Ignored.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Nature Admits No Hierarchy Of Beauty Or Usefulness Or Importance.

One Of The Reasons I Love The Online World Is That Although That Exists In Abundance You Can Choose Absolutely Which Part Of The Online World You Want To Live In. You Can Make Your Own Kingdom In That Sense.

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.

When You Get Just A Complete Sense Of Blackness Or Void Ahead Of You, That Somehow The Future Looks An Impossible Place To Be, And The Direction You Are Going Seems To Have No Purpose, There Is This Word Despair Which Is A Very Awful Thing To Feel.

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.

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.

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

Alternative Medicine People Call Themselves "holistic" And Say It's The "whole" Approach. Well, If It's The Whole Approach, Let It Be The Mind As Well. Use Logic, Use Sense, Use The Incredible Five Wits You Were Given By Creation.

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.

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

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.

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

As If A Device Can Function If It Has No Style. As If A Device Can Be Called Stylish That Does Not Function Superbly... Yes, Beauty Matters. Boy, Does It Matter. It Is Not Surface, It Is Not An Extra, It Is The Thing Itself.

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.

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

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.

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.

You Are Who You Are When Nobody's Watching.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Well, Isn't It Splendid & Rather Toffee?

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.

I'd Probably Want To Teach At University, Because Children Would Drive Me Insane. I Suspect It Would Be English Literature, Shakespeare And So Forth. I've Always Been Deeply, Deeply In Love With That Kind Of Thing.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

If We Empower Ourselves With Responsibility Over Our Actions, Responsibility Over Our Destinies And Responsibility For Directing And Maintaining And Creating Our Own Ethical And Moral Frameworks, Which Is The Most Important Thing Really Isn’t It Because Perhaps The Greatest Insult To Humanism Is This Idea That Mankind Needs A God In Order To Have A Moral Framework.

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

[...] 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.

It Was Extremely Important To Show That Wilde's Sexuality Was Not Just Some Intellectual Idea. It Was Real, And It Was About The Human Body. To Just Have Mentioned It And Not Shown It Would Have Been, I Think, Peculiar And Wrong.

Between Funny And Witty Falls The Shadow

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

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.

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.

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

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

But Happiness Is No Respecter Of Persons.

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

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.

Old Professors Never Die, They Just Lose Their Faculties.

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

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 Believe That Poetry Is A Primal Impulse Within Us All.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

Stop Feeling Sorry For Yourself And You Will Be Happy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I Do Think It's Important Not To Be Absolutely Sure, So Sure That You Can't Reinvent Yourself In Some Way, Or At Least Rediscover The Truth Of Why You Think What You Think, And Not Just Take It As An Assumption.

The Part Of [oscar] Wilde Was Exceptionally Important To Me; The Man, His Achievements, His Wisdom, But His Downfall, His Disgrace And The Tragic And Bitter End To It Have Always Fascinated, Appalled And Attracted Me Since Childhood. It Was He Who First In Some Measure Vindicated My Sexuality.

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.

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

P. G. Wodehouse... Used, When In Town, To Solve The Problem Of The Long Walk To The Post-office By The Simple Expedient Of Tossing His Letters Out Of His Window: His Belief That The Average Human, Finding A Stamped And Addressed Envelope On The Pavement, Would Naturally Pop It Into The Nearest Pillar-box Was Never Once, In Decades, Shown To Be Unfounded.

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.

We Gave You A Perfectly Good Language And You F***ed Up.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 Church Has No Power Over Our Lives Any More, Which Is Something Of A Blessing For Those Who Do Not Enjoy Red-hot Pokers Or Iron Thumb-screws.

The Email Of The Species Is Deadlier Than The Mail.

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".

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

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

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.

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 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.

People Who Can Change And Change Again Are So Much More Reliable And Happier Than Those Who Can’t

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.

I Have Van Gogh's Ear For Music

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.

Not One Word Of The Following Is True

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

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'.

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Alfred P. Sloan

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