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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.

-Stephen Fry

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To Be Human And

Stephen Fry

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Like Vichyssoise, Revenge Is A Dish Best Served Cold.

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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.

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

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 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 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.

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)

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

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'.

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

Generally, We Admire The Thing We Are Not.

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.

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.

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

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.

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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.

Entry Is Not Equivalent To Possession.

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 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.

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 Found It All About As Arousing As A Tupperware Party.

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

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?

Old Professors Never Die, They Just Lose Their Faculties.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

The Email Of The Species Is Deadlier Than The Mail.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.'

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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?

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'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 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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

If You 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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

Talent Is Inborn, But Technique Is Learned.

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Leonard Peltier

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