Stephen fry quotes oscar wilde biography

You don't get depressed because bad things happen to you. That's getting pissed off and annoyed. That's reasonable. Someone hits you in the face you go ow, you know that's It's extremely unlucky to be superstitious, for no other reason than it is always unlucky to be colossally stupid. No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time.

What's magical about [bears] is that they just spend one-hundred percent of every minute of every hour of every day being a bear. And a tree-frog spends all of its time being a tree-frog. We spend all our time trying to be somebody else. Self-consciousness, that's what it is. Always my abiding vice. I keep seeing myself. Me watching myself watching others watch me.

How do you lose that? What's the trick? I was happy there. Which is to say I was not unhappy there. Unhappiness and happiness I have always been able to carry about with me, irrespective of place and people, because I have never joined in. As children everyone thinks their family is weird and they're upset by the weirdness of their own family.

A film star is a kind of public monument, and everyone's staring at them, and they've kind of got railings around them, and they're rather miserable most of the time. Mankind can live free in a society hemmed in by laws, but we have yet to find a historical example of mankind living free in lawless anarchy. We always make the mistake, the fatal mistake in the case of military people, of imagining that each war will be a kind of version of the one that happened previously.

I never quite dare to believe I'm brave enough to be an artist, but I'm on the side of artists. I think of myself as a bit of a Salieri, looking with longing eyes at Mozart. Money and fame are trashy and don't guarantee happiness, but we all refuse really to know it. Self pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have. And the most destructive.

It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred, and I think actually hatred's a subset of self pity and not the other way around - 'It destroys everything around it, except itself. Nowadays a lot of what was wrong with me would no doubt be ascribed to Attention Deficit Disorder, tartrazine food colouring, dairy produce and air pollution.

A few hundred years earlier it would have been demons, still the best analogy I think, but not much help when it comes to a cure. All the cold-reading clairvoyants and the nonsensical astrologers and absurd ESP merchants and other such people who talk about vibrations and energies God, if there's a word that drives me mad it's "energy" used in a nonsensical way-don't get me started!

The people I know who swear the most tend to have the widest vocabularies. And of course you are mad, if by a madman we mean a mind that questions and rejects every civilized norm. 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.

It is a little theory of mine that has much exercised my mind lately, that most of the problems of this silly and delightful world derive from our apologising for those things which we ought not to apologise for, and failing to apologise for those things for which apology is necessary. It's certainly easy to mock some things Oddly enough though I've never found it easy to mock anything of value.

Only things that are tawdry and fatuous - perhaps it's just me. There is not any way that you can just choose the nice bits and say that means there is a God and ignore the true fact of what nature is. Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers. Wisdom is probably the ability to cope.

That's why someone who has to walk seven miles every day to get water for their children can be wiser than someone sitting behind a desk in Wall Street. You can't just say there is a god because the world is beautiful. You have to account for bone cancer in children — Stephen Fry. 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.

Glory never arrives through the front door. She sneaks in uninvited round the back or through an upstairs window while you are sleeping. We don't stop talking about how the world might be better just because we have no chance of making it to Prime Minister. Wilde initiated a private libel against Queensbury for defamation. Queensbury was arrested and so hired a private detective to find evidence that Wilde was involved in homosexual behaviour with young men.

At the trial, Wilde defended himself with his usual wit and flippancy, but the counsel for the Marquees William Carson Esq. Realising he had miscalculated, Wilde dropped his stephen fry quotes oscar wilde biography case but became liable for the financial cost which left him bankrupt. The trial moved to a quick conclusion and Wilde was found guilty.

It is no understatement to say this experience deeply shocked and affected the previously ebullient Wilde. In some respects he never really recovered; on his release, he left for Paris where he lived in comparative anonymity. However, he retained his wit and continued to write, heavily influenced by his chastening experiences. I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky, And at every drifting cloud that went With sails of silver by.

The Life of Wilde was turbulent and volatile — never short of incident. It reflected his own inner paradoxes and revolutionary views. In some ways, he was both a saint and sinner at the same time. My dear Robbie, You are usually so kind in sending me my allowance on the 30th of the month, so that I can touch it by the 1st, that I write to say that nothing has yet arrived.

The post often goes wrong, so I write merely to tell you. Perhaps you might look at them. In a book review in the periodical Bookseller asserted that Australians had word-choice difficulties with the same terms that concerned Wilde [BKRG]:. QI is unable to corroborate the exact wording on the note described by Fry at this time. Thank you for an entertaining question.

Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is. You do not have to choose between one or the other. You can have both. The human cultural jungle should be as varied and plural as the Amazonian rainforest.

Stephen fry quotes oscar wilde biography

We are all richer for biodiversity. We may decide that a puma is worth more to us than a caterpillar, but surely we can agree that the habitat is all the better for being able to sustain each. Without Wodehouse I am not sure that I would be a tenth of what I am today -- whatever that may be. In my teenage years, his writings awoke me to the possibilities of language.

His rhythms, tropes, tricks and mannerisms are deep within me. But more than that, he taught me something about good nature. It is enough to be benign, to be gentle, to be funny, to be kind. Without them life is safe, but not worth bothering with. I am free. My teeth are clean. The sun shines. It is impossible for a single The sky was never the same colour, the moon never the same shape: the air never smelt the same, food never tasted the same.

Every word I knew changed its meaning, everything that once was stable and firm became as insubstantial as a puff of wind, and every puff of wind became a solid thing I could feel and touch.