Top 380 Stephen Fry Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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.”

— Stephen Fry

102. “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.”

— Stephen Fry

103. “How can one not be fond of something that the Daily Mail despises?”

— Stephen Fry

104. “Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.”

— Stephen Fry

105. “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.”

— Stephen Fry

106. “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.”

— Stephen Fry

107. “I’m a bit of a coward, and lazy, oddly enough.”

— Stephen Fry

108. “Enthusiats are used to being mocked, maligned and misunderstood. We don’t really mind.”

— Stephen Fry

109. “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.”

— Stephen Fry

110. “Literature is the only access to truth we have on this planet.”

— Stephen Fry

111. “There’s nothing worse than the British in one of their fits of morality.”

— Stephen Fry

112. “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.””

— Stephen Fry

113. “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.”

— Stephen Fry

114. “I have pushed the boat out as far as I should in terms of taking on too many things. I’m getting older and I just could not take it any more. I am now monitoring myself very closely and I’m just trying not to get into that sort of state again.”

— Stephen Fry

115. “I’ve always been aware of my sexuality, but I never quite knew what it meant...”

— Stephen Fry

116. “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.”

— Stephen Fry

117. “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.”

— Stephen Fry

118. “Things are always worse in the steady watches of the night.”

— Stephen Fry

119. “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.”

— Stephen Fry

120. “Stop wanting wealth and fame and start wanting instead to do something well about which you are passionate.”

— Stephen Fry

121. “Wit can be beautiful, because it expresses and distills an idea.”

— Stephen Fry

122. “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.”

— Stephen Fry

123. “The service took place on one of those afternoons that occur only in the past.”

— Stephen Fry

124. “You see?′ said Prometheus. ‘It is your fate to be Heracles the hero, burdened with labours, yet it is also your choice. You choose to submit to it. Such is the paradox of living. We willingly accept that we have no will.”

— Stephen Fry

125. “They say a fool and his gold are soon parted, but they ought to say too that those who refuse ever to be parted from gold are the greatest fools of all.”

— Stephen Fry

126. “A little Learning is a dang’rous Thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring.”

— Stephen Fry

127. “As all travellers know, the experience of a foreign country teaches about your own.”

— Stephen Fry

128. “You choose to submit to it. Such is the paradox of living. We willingly accept that we have no will.”

— Stephen Fry

129. “Have faith in what music can do.”

— Stephen Fry

130. “Perhaps narcissism is best defined as a need to look on other people as mirrored surfaces who satisfy us only when they reflect back a loving or admiring image of ourselves. When we look into another’s eyes, in other words, we are not looking to see who they are, but how we are reflected in their eyes. By this definition, which of us can honestly disown our share of narcissism?”

— Stephen Fry

131. “Nothing in this world is at it seems. Except, possibly, porridge.”

— Stephen Fry

132. “No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time.”

— Stephen Fry

133. “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.”

— Stephen Fry

134. “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?”

— Stephen Fry

135. “Nudity is a deep worry if you have a body like a bin bag full of yoghurt, which I have.”

— Stephen Fry

136. “Seriousness is no more a guarantee of truth, insight, authenticity or probity, than humour is a guarantee of superficiality and stupidity.”

— Stephen Fry

137. “The seeding of Gaia gave us meaning, a germination of thought into shape. Seminal semantic semiology from the semen of the sky.”

— Stephen Fry

138. “You don’t need a Harvard MBA to know that the bedroom and the boardroom are just two sides of the same ballgame.”

— Stephen Fry

139. “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.”

— Stephen Fry

140. “A Hungarian Jew, as he looked to observe, is the only man who can follow you into a revolving door and come out first.”

— Stephen Fry

141. “Compromise is a stalling between two fools.”

— Stephen Fry

142. “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.”

— Stephen Fry

143. “I suppose people were trying to be kind and protect me from the humiliation of discovering that, even after an operation to straighten my ridiculous nose, I would still look a mess. The trauma of finding out that a straight-nosed Stephen looked every bit as unappetising as a bent-nosed Stephen might have tipped me completely over the edge.”

— Stephen Fry

144. “Cambridge produces martyrs and Oxford burns them.”

— Stephen Fry

145. “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.”

— Stephen Fry

146. “Many people would no more think of entering journalism than the sewage business – which at least does us all some good.”

— Stephen Fry

147. “Green fingers are better than gold.”

— Stephen Fry

148. “I was born Mary Patterson, but then I married and naturally took my husband’s name, so now I’m Neil Patterson.”

— Stephen Fry

149. “Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.”

— Stephen Fry

150. “I don’t believe there is a God. If I were to believe in a god, l would believe in gods.”

— Stephen Fry