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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.

-Stephen Fry

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One Of The Most

Stephen Fry

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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.

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Brave New World

More From Stephen Fry

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.

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 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'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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

My Father Was All Brain And Little Heart.

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

Talent Is Inborn, But Technique Is Learned.

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

Between Funny And Witty Falls The Shadow

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.

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

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

The Other Man's Arse Is Always Cleaner!

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.

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.

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.'

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

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

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.

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.

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

I Shall Sustain A Massive Erection, That’s What, And I Shan’t Be Answerable For The Consequences. Some Kind Of Ejaculation Is Almost Bound To Ensue And If Either Of You Were To Become Pregnant I Should Never Forgive Myself.

You'll Often Hear The Phrase "science Doesn't Know Everything." Well, Of Course It Doesn't Know Everything. But Just Because Science Doesn't Know Everything Doesn't Mean That It Knows Nothing.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

I've Never Had Any Illusions About Being A Lead Actor In Films, Because Lead Actors Have To Be Of A Certain Kind.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

[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!'

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.

And Of Course You Are Mad, If By A Madman We Mean A Mind That Questions And Rejects Every Civilized Norm.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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's Rather Splendid To Think Of All Those Great Men And Women Who Appear To Have Presented Symptoms That Allow Us To Describe Them As Bipolar. Whether It's Hemingway, Van Gogh... Robert Schumann Has Been Mentioned... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath... Some Of Them With Rather Grim Ends.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Entry Is Not Equivalent To Possession.

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

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

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.

You Are Who You Are When Nobody's Watching.

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

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'.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

Skepsis. I Am A True Skeptic, Born Under The Noble Sign Of Skepsis, The Sign Of The Man Who Knows That All Astrology Is Absolutely And Without Reservation The Bullest Of Bullsh*t That Ever There Was. It Is A Senseless Delusion That Does Not Even Have The Benefit Of Being Harmless Fun. It Is A Harmful Bore. Harmful To The Human Spirit, Harmful To The Dignity And Wonder Of The Real Universe And The Real Power Of The Mind To Think For Itself. I Hate Astrology With A Fervor That Is Almost Frightening. - Stephen Fry (when Asked What Sign He Would Be If He Could Create His Own Zodiac)

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Freedom Of Speech

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nature Admits No Hierarchy Of Beauty Or Usefulness Or Importance.

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Hold The Newsreader's Nose Squarely, Waiter, Or Friendly Milk Will Countermand My Trousers.

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.

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?

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 Like People Who Are As Unlike Me As Possible, Which Is Not An Expression Of Self Disgust Or Self Hatred, But It's Just That You Know You Obviously Particularly Admire Things That You Recognize Yourself As Not Having.

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.

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

Just As It Is The Love Of Money That Is The Root Of All Evil, It Is The Belief In Shamefulness That Is The Root Of All Misery.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

My Parents Were Marvelously Educated People.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

I Do Believe That Almost Everything I Do Is Based On My Feelings, Not On My Intellect. Though But We Won't Chase Ourselves Up The Particular Sentiment, Or We'll Get Lost.

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

It May Be That There Is An Afterlife And I'll Look Incredibly Stupid, But At Least I Will Have Had A Crammed Pre Afterlife, A Crammed Life, So To Me The Most Important Thing Is You Know As Kipling Put It. [...] To Fill Every Unforgiving Minute With 60 Seconds Worth Of Distance Run.

I Have Always Been An Impassioned Advocate For The Works Of Shakespeare. I Regard Him As One Of The Most Complete Miracles Of His Or Any Other Age.

Compromise Is A Stalling Between Two Fools.

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 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.

Generally, We Admire The Thing We Are Not.

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".

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.

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

Well, Isn't It Splendid & Rather Toffee?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

A Cut Glass English Accent Can Fool Unsuspecting Americans Into Detecting A Brilliance That Isn't There

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.

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

Stop Feeling Sorry For Yourself And You Will Be Happy.

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.

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

Atheism Is Not Just About Not Believing There Is A God, But On The Assumption That There Is One, What Kind Of God Is He?

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

The Email Of The Species Is Deadlier Than The Mail.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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