Stephen Fry Quotes

I really don't like when things are all polished and perfect - the perfect love story and the hair is perfect.

If literary terms were about artistic merit and not the rules of convenience, about achievement and not safety, the term 'realism' would be an honorary one, conferred only on work that actually builds unsentimental reality on the page, that matches the complexity of life with an equally rich arrangement in language.

Every day is bizarre.

It's an odd world.

'Arbitrary' and 'odd' are the words which best describe the pattern of my career. I'm perpetually baffled by the whole thing.

I think because of the eccentricity of my work and how I dress, people expect me to be bouncing off the walls. But that's just not how I am.

Artistic honesty sometimes prevents an artist from being born.

What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.

The easiest thing to do on earth is not write…But this is life on earth, you can't have everything.

You can write something that has continuity, but it makes happy endings all the more ridiculous.

I think when I write movies and plays and books and magazine articles, they're all storytelling, and reality is the common denominator that binds them.

On "Tonight" I think I was torn dreadfully between writing what I wanted to write, but keeping it in a style that would follow up what I had just done. That's where I feel I was untrue to myself as an artist . . . that album and, to a lesser extent, "Never Let Me Down."

The seeming significance of nature's appearances, their unchanging strangeness to the senses, and the thrilling response which they awaken in the mind of man . . . If we could only write near enough to the facts, and yet with no pedestrian calm, but ardently, we might transfer the glamour of reality direct upon our pages.

I have received 16 Grammy nominations and I have no trophies, because I chose to write the harsh realities. I stayed true to myself and I've taken a little beating behind it.

That’s one of the nice things about writing, or any art; if the thing’s real, it just lives.

I write toward both idealism and reality - how things are and how I wish they could be.

The man who really counts in the world is the doer, not the mere critic -- the man who actually does the work, even if roughly and imperfectly, not the man who only talks or writes about how it ought to be done.

Screenwriting is not an artform, it is a punishment from God.

Sometimes you write and you find yourself almost wondering how it will turn out. I don't think every writer sort of almost admits that at some stage his books can take on their own kind of life it selves and simply lead away into directions that they're not kind of prepared for.

Who is more real? Homer or Ulysses? Shakespeare or Hamlet? Burroughs or Tarzan?

The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten days and already cast out. Once again prodigious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you.

All you can write is what you see.

If you don't write the book, the book ain't gonna get written.

I don't really have the gift of the sustained narrative that you need to write a book. I've tried a couple of times, and it just doesn't work. But I get some good passages, so what I'm going to do is just take sections out of them.

When you write a novel, there’s a level at which you are much more revealing about who you are because you’re less self-conscious about how you’re presenting yourself. You are accidentally leaving your DNA all over everything in a novel because it’s all coming from you.