Top 100 Hugh Laurie Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “When school friends would think about appearing on stage as the most frightening, the most awful, intimidating experience ever, I knew that it was something I could do.”

— Hugh Laurie

52. “I feel like I’m working on an oil rig right now. I’m away from home a lot.”

— Hugh Laurie

53. “People assume that I’m very highly trained, that I studied and did years and years of Shakespeare. I have no training whatsoever and I’ve only done one Shakespeare play at university. If people want to believe that, I’m happy to go along with it.”

— Hugh Laurie

54. “I would cling to unhappiness because it was a known, familiar state. When I was happier, it was because I knew I was on my way back to misery. I’ve never been convinced that happiness is the object of the game. I’m wary of happiness.”

— Hugh Laurie

55. “I admit I can’t shake the idea that there is virtue in suffering, that there is a sort of psychic economy, whereby if you embrace success, happiness and comfort, these things have to be paid for.”

— Hugh Laurie

56. “There’s an undeniable pleasure in stepping into an open-top sports car driven by a beautiful woman. It feels like you’re climbing into a metaphor.”

— Hugh Laurie

57. “I have resolved to pick one novel and just read it over and over again for the rest of my life, because I cannot remember anything anymore.”

— Hugh Laurie

58. “Humility was a cult in my family. I only got it out of my father by accident when he was very old that he had won an Olympic gold medal.”

— Hugh Laurie

59. “I rowed for Cambridge. I was pretty good at that.”

— Hugh Laurie

60. “Clive Dunn, as I understand it, retired to the south of Spain, where he worked extensively in watercolours. I don’t own any of Clive Dunn’s watercolours. I loved him in ‘Dad’s Army,’ loved him. But not enough to actually seek out his watercolour work.”

— Hugh Laurie

61. “I couldn’t imagine what Fox thought they were doing, contemplating such a jagged protagonist for a prime-time drama. I only knew that I wanted the role very much.”

— Hugh Laurie

62. “I travel to work on my motorcycle, so it’s jeans, boots and a brown Aero leather jacket that weighs as much as I do. If it were black, it would seem like I’ve got a Brando idea going on, which I don’t.”

— Hugh Laurie

63. “I suppose actors crave attention of some kind or they have suffered some form of arrested development and are still living in a sort of child’s fantasy existence at some level in their psyche.”

— Hugh Laurie

64. “I personally believe that the iPod is a frankly corrosive device because it encourages you to surround yourself with your favorites. The whole idea of a playlist is to surround yourself with your favorite things, and the interesting thing is that when you do that, they cease to be your favorites.”

— Hugh Laurie

65. “One great benefit of not being on TV every week is that people will be a lot less interested in what I have in my supermarket basket. I could even un-tint my car windows – or at least opt for a lighter shade.”

— Hugh Laurie

66. “The only good thing I’ve ever noticed about money, the only positive aspect of an otherwise pretty vulgar commodity, is that you can use it to buy things.”

— Hugh Laurie

67. “Celebrity is absolutely preposterous. Entertainment seems to be inflating. It used to be the punctuation to your life, a film or a novel or a play, a way of celebrating a good week or month. Now it feels as if it’s all punctuation.”

— Hugh Laurie

68. “To be able to pretend to be something that I’m frankly not is very liberating and exciting.”

— Hugh Laurie

69. “It gets on top of me and I get frustrated.”

— Hugh Laurie

70. “Believe it or not, perhaps I don’t show it much, or well, but I think I like people.”

— Hugh Laurie

71. “I think maybe even one of the reasons I became an actor was actually to hide. I mean, it sounds paradoxical because, of course, people are standing up in a public place and encouraging other people to look at them. So that’s not the conventional definition of hiding.”

— Hugh Laurie

72. “I didn’t realize House would be the central character, more the bitter comic relief appearing occasionally. I relish his wounded nature – the lameness, the scarred Byronic hero.”

— Hugh Laurie

73. “The French came to Morocco to build roads, railways, hospitals, schools, fashion sense – all the things that the average Frenchman knows to be indispensable to a modern civilization – and when five o’clock came, and the French looked upon their works and saw that they were good, they reckoned they had bloody well earned the right to live like Maharajahs. Which, for a time, they did.”

— Hugh Laurie

74. “Necessity is the mother of self-delusion.”

— Hugh Laurie

75. “In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers.” Neville Chamberlain.”

— Hugh Laurie

76. “I had too many things to say, and too small a brain to sort them out with.”

— Hugh Laurie

77. “Don’t go to Casablanca expecting it to be like the film. In fact, if you’re not too busy, and your schedule allows it, don’t go to Casablanca at all.”

— Hugh Laurie

78. “Face-cream, hand-cream, nose-cream, eye-cream. I wondered for a moment how serious it would be if you ever got home drunk and accidentally put face-cream on your hands or hand-cream on your face.”

— Hugh Laurie

79. “I saw a man this morning Who did not wish to die” Patrick Shaw-Stewart.”

— Hugh Laurie

80. “Later, a very fat woman came in with a trolley and put a plate of something brown and foul-smelling on a table beside me. I couldn’t imagine what I’d ever done to her, but whatever it was, it must have been bad. She obviously realised that she’d over-reacted, because half an hour later she came and took the plate away again.”

— Hugh Laurie

81. “Now, where did I leave my time-machine? Oh I know, next Wednesday.”

— Hugh Laurie

82. “Look,’ I said, ‘I’ll be honest with you. You’re a big chap, and I’m sure you can do more press-ups than I can. And I admire you for it. This world needs people to be able to do press-ups. It’s important.”

— Hugh Laurie

83. “Well, that obviously wasn’t good enough. Not by a long shot. Saying period at the end of something doesn’t make it incontrovertible.”

— Hugh Laurie

84. “She kissed me. She kissed me. What I mean is, I was standing there, lips puckered, brain puckered, and she just stepped up and threw her tongue into my mouth. For a moment, I thought maybe she’d tripped on a floorboard and stuck out her tongue as a reflex – but that didn’t seem very likely somehow, and anyway, once she’d got her balance back, wouldn’t she have put her tongue away again? No, she was definitely kissing me.”

— Hugh Laurie

85. “His name was Rayner. First name unknown. By me, at any rate, and therefore, presumably, by you too.”

— Hugh Laurie

86. “The first item was fighting under the name ‘Crostini of Mealed Tarroce, with Benatore Potatoes’ and weighed in at an impressive twelve pounds sixty-five. The Ralph Lauren blonde came over and asked me if I needed any help with the menu, and I asked her to explain what potatoes were. She didn’t laugh.”

— Hugh Laurie

87. “I stood and waited on the open second-floor landing, and tried to imagine what appalling series of bureaucratic errors had led to this estate being so well looked after. In most parts of London, they collect the dustbins from the middle-class streets and empty them into the council estates, before setting fire to a couple of Ford Cortinas on the pavement.”

— Hugh Laurie

88. “It’s good that you feel bad,’ she said, after some thought. Not much thought, obviously, but some. ‘If you felt nothing, it would mean there is no love, no passion. And we are nothing without passion.”

— Hugh Laurie

89. “Of course, they hadn’t really been happier at all. But they ’d been days, and they’d had Sarah in them, and that was near enough.”

— Hugh Laurie

90. “I was working on the principle, you see, that the more obvious you are, the less obvious you are.”

— Hugh Laurie

91. “I stayed where I was and watched. The man and the corridor. He didn’t make any other noise, and the corridor didn’t do anything that corridors don’t normally do.”

— Hugh Laurie

92. “To follow somebody, without them knowing that you’re doing it, is not the doddle they make it seem in films. I’ve had some experience of professional following, and a lot more experience of professional going back to the office and saying ‘we lost him’. Unless your quarry is deaf, tunnel-sighted and lame, you need at least a dozen people and fifteen thousand quids-worth of short-wave radio to make a decent go of it.”

— Hugh Laurie

93. “Solomon raised an eyebrow. Or rather, he left it where it was and dropped his body slightly.”

— Hugh Laurie

94. “I had an absolutely revolting lunch with O’Neal. Although the food was pretty good.”

— Hugh Laurie

95. “It’s not the way we do it on planet Earth, certainly.”

— Hugh Laurie

96. “I had to wonder how Ginny could hold her head up under the weight of cosmetics smeared all over her face. Underneath it all, she may have been quite pretty. Or she may have been Dirk Bogarde. I will never know.”

— Hugh Laurie

97. “If you want a place guarded properly, hire Germans.”

— Hugh Laurie

98. “She just played with it slowly, and then pointed a pair of grey eyes at me. I say a pair. I mean her pair. She didn’t get a pair of someone else’s out from a drawer and point them at me. She pointed her own pair of huge, pale, grey, pale, huge eyes at me. The sort of eyes that can make a grown man talk gibberish to himself. Get a grip, for Christ’s sake.”

— Hugh Laurie

99. “He flapped his mouth some more, and then shook himself awake, came to a decision, and starting sneaking huge, theatrical looks around the restaurant, as a way of telling all the other lunchers that I Am Now Going To Give This Man An Important Piece of Paper.”

— Hugh Laurie

100. “I realise it must be strange for you, being here in England. I realise that we must strike you as a nation of hicks, who only got hot and cold running water the day before you flew in, but even so, I have to tell you that I’ve heard a lot of this before.”

— Hugh Laurie