STEPHEN FRY

My father was all brain and little heart.

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.

There is so much we can learn from TV. It's a window on the world.

It only takes a room of Americans for the English and Australians to realise how much we have in common.

When you get just a complete sense of blackness or void ahead of you, that somehow the future looks an impossible place to be, and the direction you are going seems to have no purpose, there is this word despair which is a very awful thing to feel.

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.

You can act in five, six, or seven films in the time it takes to direct one film.

You can't reason yourself back into cheerfulness any more than you can reason yourself into an extra six inches in height.

It is a cliche that most cliches are true, but then like most cliches, that cliche is untrue.

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.

Generally, we admire the thing we are not.

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.

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.

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

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.

I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.

Philosophy is an odd thing. When we use the word in everyday speech, you know, you sometimes hear it hilariously.

I'm a bit of a coward, and lazy, oddly enough.

An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.