Stephen Fry Quotes

Where's your will to be weird?

Anybody who knows me has said, 'I had a Denis O'Hare moment.' I suppose in the kindest instance it means standing up for yourself. In the unkindest, it means the crazy guy in the street.

I always found that the more extreme and the more eccentric I was, that's what would separate me. I always felt that I needed that separation; otherwise, I'd just be like everybody else.

Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists

The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people - people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behavior, just as money frees people from work.

Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.

On a very rough-and-ready basis we might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having determined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others. An eccentric puts ice cream on steak simply because he likes it; should a crank do so, he would endow the act with moral grandeur and straightaway denounce as sinners (or reactionaries) all who failed to follow suit. Cranks, at their most familiar, are a sort of peevish prophets, and it's not enough that they should be in the right; others must also be in the wrong.

I have been known as a crank, faddist, madman. Evidently the reputation is well deserved. For wherever I go, I draw to myself cranks, faddists, and madmen.

If you're weird, it's good to be weird.

I've always felt like such an outsider in this industry. Because I'm so insane I guess.

there is no fanatic like a religious fanatic.

Normal people do not create art.

How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.

It takes more than going down to the video store and renting "Easy Rider" to be a rebel.

The greater a man's talents, the more marked his idiosyncracies. Yet in the provinces originality is considered perilously close to lunacy.

A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted-in the air.

Take a look around, there are misfits everywhere.

I can do anything I want, I'm eccentric!

If a man has not, by the time he is thirty, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism—I don't know whether he is to be admired or scorned, regarded as a saint or a corpse.

It's Wierd not to be Wierd.

People who don't quite fit society, they are often kind of either under an awful lot of pressure or otherwise not acceptable to the mainstream and that tells us a lot about who we are. The people that don't fit are a great way of reflecting on all of us.

The interesting adults are always the school failures, the weird ones, the losers, the malcontents, this isn’t wishful thinking. It’s the rule.

I'm the last of the mad ones.

In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric.

No one was normal, not really.