Stephen Fry
Stephen Fry is a British actor, comedian, writer, and television presenter, born in Hampstead on 24 August 1957.
He was educated at City College Norwich, Paston College, and Queens' College, a sequence that brought him through to the academic foundations of his later career across multiple creative disciplines. It was through the comedy partnership known as Fry and Laurie that he first drew sustained public attention, co-writing and co-starring in the television series A Bit of Fry and Laurie. The collaboration placed him at the centre of British comedy as both a performer and a craftsman of comic material.
Alongside his work in front of the camera, Fry has pursued a parallel career as a novelist. His novel The Liar appeared in 1993, and was followed in 1997 by Making History, a work of alternate history fiction. Making History earned him the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, a recognition given to works that engage imaginatively with the idea of divergent historical timelines. He holds citizenship of both the United Kingdom and Austria.
The range of his output — spanning stage and screen performance, television presenting, and prose fiction — reflects a career conducted across several distinct creative registers. The alternate history genre, recognised formally through the Sidewise Award, represents one of the recurring fictional preoccupations evident in his written work.
Quotes by Stephen Fry
Stephen Fry's insights on:
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.
Few people in one’s life ever go quite away. They turn up again like characters in a Simon Raven novel. It is as if Fate is a movie producer who cannot afford to keep introducing new characters into the script but must get as many scenes out of every actor as possible.
Language was all that I could do, but it never, I felt, came close to a dance or a song or a gliding through water. Language could serve as a weapon, a shield and a disguise, it had many strengths. It could bully, cajole, deceive, wheedle and intimidate. Sometimes it could even delight, amuse, charm, seduce and endear, but always as a solo turn, never a dance.
The fool doth think he is wise, yet it is the wise man that knows himself to be the fool As You Like It, Act 5, Scene 1.
To me, reason is as spiritual as anything else, the beauty of reason seems to me indelible and ineffable and numinous... the spirit is after all the same word we use to describe... essence.
Late, Fry?’ ‘Really, sir? So am I.’ ‘Don’t try to be clever, boy.’ ‘Very good, sir. How stupid would you like me to be? Very stupid or only slightly stupid?
He knew he could never jingle change in his pocket or park his car like a confident adult, he was the Adrian he had always been, casting a guilty look over a furtive shoulder, living in eternal dread of a grown-up striding forward to clip his ear.