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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.

-Stephen Fry

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You Don't Get Depressed

Stephen Fry

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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I 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.

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

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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.

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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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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.

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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.'

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.

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 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.

[...] 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Entry Is Not Equivalent To Possession.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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!

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Wisdom Is Probably The Ability To Cope. That's Why Someone Who Has To Walk Seven Miles Every Day To Get Water For Their Children Can Be Wiser Than Someone Sitting Behind A Desk In Wall Street.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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'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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

As Children Everyone Thinks Their Family Is Weird And They're Upset By The Weirdness Of Their Own Family.

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.

Between Funny And Witty Falls The Shadow

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.

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.

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.

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

But An Adrian Also Knew That An Adrian's Lies Were Real: They Were Lived And Felt And Acted Out As Thoroughly As Another Man's Truths - If Other Men Had Truths - And He Believed It Possible That This Last Lie Might See Him Through To The Grave.

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

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.

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.

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.

Everything Had Been Based On A Kind Of Certainty, A Sense Of Man At The Center Of Things, A Sense Of Order And Hierarchy. And Suddenly, Almost Simultaneously, Extraordinary Discoveries Are Made.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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