Top 380 Stephen Fry Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Pomposity and indignation grow in old age, like nostril hairs and earlobes.”

— Stephen Fry

202. “If you spend your life on a moral hill-top, you see nothing but the mud below. If, like me, you live in the mud itself, you get a damned good view of clear blue sky and clean green hills above. There’s none so evil-minded as those with a moral mission, and none so pure in heart as the depraved.”

— Stephen Fry

203. “Not one word of the following is true.”

— Stephen Fry

204. “As children everyone thinks their family is weird and they’re upset by the weirdness of their own family.”

— Stephen Fry

205. “A book is judged, not by its reference to life, but by its reference to other books.”

— Stephen Fry

206. “There can’t be that many individual souls. Not souls like mine. There isn’t room. There can’t be.”

— Stephen Fry

207. “Poseidon spent almost all his time pursuing a perfectly exhausting quantity of beautiful girls and boys and fathering by the girls an even greater number of monsters, demigods and human heroes – Percy Jackson and Theseus to name but two.”

— Stephen Fry

208. “I like to think of myself at home in the armchair, writing, smoking and occasionally wandering down the shop.”

— Stephen Fry

209. “I shouldn’t be saying this – high treason, really – but I sometimes wonder if Americans aren’t fooled by our accent into detecting brilliance that may not really be there.”

— Stephen Fry

210. “Gaia visited her daughter Mnemosyne, who was busy being unpronounceable.”

— Stephen Fry

211. “I don’t watch television, I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.”

— Stephen Fry

212. “The action is played out on the golden horizon between reality and legend, the beguiling penumbra where fable and fact coexist.”

— Stephen Fry

213. “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.”

— Stephen Fry

214. “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.”

— Stephen Fry

215. “Unless you are curious, in which case I love you, for curiosity about the world and all its corners is a beautiful thing.”

— Stephen Fry

216. “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...”

— Stephen Fry

217. “Hermes, the Psychopomp.”

— Stephen Fry

218. “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.”

— Stephen Fry

219. “There’s no doubt that I do have extremes of mood that are greater than just about anybody else I know.”

— Stephen Fry

220. “I think we have all experienced passion that is not in any sense reasonable.”

— Stephen Fry

221. “You will not find the truth but the truth will find you,’ ‘Seek not to know, but know to seek,’ ‘You don’t make mistakes, mistakes make you.”

— Stephen Fry

222. “The British are like that, especially the middle class Radio 4 audience: a young snappy, angry person annoys them, and they shout at the radio for him to show some respect and get the spiritual and intellectual equivalent of a haircut. But let the same sentiments exactly, word for word, be uttered in high academic tones, as if by a compound of G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and Anthony Quinton, and they will roll onto their tummies and purr.”

— Stephen Fry

223. “There is simply no limit to the tyrannical snobbery that otherwise decent people can descend into when it comes to music.”

— Stephen Fry

224. “I knew I couldn’t believe in God, because I was fundamentally Hellenic in my outlook.”

— Stephen Fry

225. “I suppose the thing that really interests me is what mankind did with the big, big, big discoveries that have created our modern age.”

— Stephen Fry

226. “It was as if he grew his hair long and smoked cigarettes because he liked to, not because he liked being seen to. This was dangerously subversive.”

— Stephen Fry

227. “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.”

— Stephen Fry

228. “This species, the mute swan, became holy to Apollo. In remembrance of the death of the beloved Phaeton the bird is silent all its life until the very moment of its death, when it sings with terrible melancholy its strange and lovely goodbye, its swan song. In honour of Cygnus the young of all swans are called ‘cygnets’.”

— Stephen Fry

229. “Strife’s sister NEMESIS was the embodiment of Retribution, that remorseless strand of cosmic justice that punishes presumptuous, overreaching ambition – the vice that the Greeks called hubris.”

— Stephen Fry

230. “My life, at least, is divided between writing and performing and mixtures of the two.”

— Stephen Fry

231. “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.”

— Stephen Fry

232. “Gaia listened carefully to this wise counsel and – as we all do, whether mortal or immortal – ignored it.”

— Stephen Fry

233. “Goodness me. You don’t ask for the moon, do you?” “Oh, what a good idea! The moon. Yes, I’d love the moon, please. That will be all. I’ll never ask for anything ever again ever.”

— Stephen Fry

234. “The memory of pain soon goes, the memory of pleasure lingers, that is one of life’s happier truths.”

— Stephen Fry

235. “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.”

— Stephen Fry

236. “Glory never arrives through the front door. She sneaks in uninvited round the back or through an upstairs window while you are sleeping.”

— Stephen Fry

237. “My parents were marvelously educated people.”

— Stephen Fry

238. “Even meaning and destiny themselves can be read in ordinary things, if you have the gift.”

— Stephen Fry

239. “Places of incredible glamour, possibility, power, excitement and pleasure. Love your libraries!”

— Stephen Fry

240. “Entry is not equivalent to possession.”

— Stephen Fry

241. “Real hot, fierce, flickering, flaming fire to enable them to melt, smelt, roast, toast, boil, broil, fashion and forge;.”

— Stephen Fry

242. “Thanatos, the grim, forbidding figure of Death.”

— Stephen Fry

243. “I think faith in each other is much harder than faith in God.”

— Stephen Fry

244. “I believe one of the greatest human failings is to prefer to be right than to be effective. Political correctness is always obsessed with how right it is without thinking how effective it might be. I do relish transgression and I deeply and instinctively distrust conformity and orthodoxy.”

— Stephen Fry

245. “Oh, it takes a lot for me to walk out of a film.”

— Stephen Fry

246. “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.”

— Stephen Fry

247. “Somehow, as a writer, you tend to use words to paper over structural cracks.”

— Stephen Fry

248. “It was extremely important to show that Wilde’s sexuality was not just some intellectual idea. It was real, and it was about the human body. To just have mentioned it and not shown it would have been, I think, peculiar and wrong.”

— Stephen Fry

249. “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.”

— Stephen Fry

250. “Because, let’s face it, I do not get offered the parts that Brad Pitt has just turned down.”

— Stephen Fry