Stephen Fry

He is the son of Marianne Fry and physicist/inventor Alan Fry.

He has an older brother, Roger, and 7-year younger sister, Jo Foster (his agent).

He is a Macintosh fanatic, Usenet lurker, Internet/WWW enthusiast.

He is a cricket fan, Sherlockian, and a charter member of the Groucho Club (Soho).

He was made the rector of Dundee University and hon. doctorate from that institution (July 1995).

He flies his own classic biplane.

He claims the UK record for saying fuck on television most times in one live broadcast.

Hes regarded in the UK as Britains Favourite Teddy Bear and is a keen teddy bear collector himself.

He hosted the 2001 and 2002 British Academy Awards (BAFTAS), which have been their 2 most successful years.

He was a regular guest on the BBC quiz "Have I Got News for You" for many years but he now allegedly refuses to appear as a protest against the sacking of his friend and the former host Angus Deayton.

He narrated the audio-book versions (British releases) of the wildly popular Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling.

He was nominated for Broadways 1987 Tony Award as one of several writers, including the deceased L. Arthur Rose and Douglas Furber as well as collaborator Mike Ockrent , as Best Book for "Me and My Girl.".

He was one of the guests at Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles wedding.

He smoked a pipe.

With Nick Green , co-founded the Bear Rescue Foundation, a charitable trust to rescue and nurture distressed bears.

He is the godfather of Hugh Laurie and Jo Greens three children.

A book has recently been published in the U.K. entitled Tish and Pish: How to Be of a Speakingness Like Stephen Fry (author: Stewart Ferris). Its a humorous tribute to Stephens wonderful use of the English language.

He has a very wide taste in music, with particular favorites being Richard Wagner , Led Zeppelin and ABBA. He is a big fan of the British comedy rock band The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band (best known for their 1968 hit "Im the Urban Spaceman") and participated in their 40th anniversary reunion show at the Astoria in London on January 28, 2006, along with Adrian Edmondson , Paul Merton and Phill Jupitus. He is also a fan of the progressive rock band Jethro Tull.

He took part in a special celebrity edition of Blankety Blank on The Princes Trust 30th Birthday: Live. He won against contestant Chantelle Houghton.

In the Independent on Sunday 2006 Pink List -- a list of the most influential gay men and women -- he came no. 23, down from 21.

He was a member of the Cambridge Footlights and in 1981, along with Hugh Laurie , Tony Slattery , Emma Thompson , Penny Dwyer , and Paul Shearer , became the first winner of The Perrier Comedy Award at the Edinburgh fringe festival.

He was a close friend of author and fellow Cambridge graduate Douglas Adams. He claims to know why Adams chose the number 42 as the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything in his novel The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. However, he refuses at length to disclose the reason, or will act as if the microphone magically malfunctions, as if the Universe itself is stopping him from making the revelation. After Adams untimely death in 2001, he was cast as the Narrator in the film version, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy , inheriting the role from the late Peter Jones.

He has been very open about the fact that he suffers from bipolar disorder.

He is very fond of vintage British TV themes.

In the 1980s he shared a house in London with Hugh Laurie. They needed some plastering doing. The plasterers turned out to be Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson who were inspired by Fry and Laurie to have a go at comedy.

He won the 1998 Sidewise Award for Alternate History for his novel Making History.

He has been described as "deeply dippy for all things digital", claims to have owned the second Apple Macintosh sold in the UK (after friend Douglas Adams ) and to have never encountered a smartphone that he has not bought.

When in London, Fry drives his own black cab for ease of transportation.

He was ranked #44 in the 2008 Telegraphs list "the 100 most powerful people in British culture".

He is related to English sportsman, politician and polymath C. B. Fry.

He blacked out his website as part of Internet Blackout Week NZ to protest against the controversial New Zealand Section 92A law which has ISPs disconnect users accused of copyright infringement.

He mentioned on "Friday Night with Jonathan Ross" (on a night when Tom Cruise was another guest) that he was offered a role in Valkyrie .

He speaks German.

His maternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Surany, now in Slovakia. His fathers family is English.

His very recognisable crooked nose is a result of breaking it when he fell over in the school playground at the age of six.

He recorded an outro for popular You-Tube vlogger, Charlie Mcdonnell. (aka. Charlieissocoollike).

He served as best man at friend Hugh Laurie and Jo Greens wedding in 1989.

He was good friends with Carrie Fisher.

Fry fervently supports the return of the Elgin Marbles to Greece.

He supports Norwich City Football Club, regularly attending games (as his schedule allows) and is on the board of directors.

He played the Irish author and playwright Oscar Wilde in both "Ned Blessing: The Story of My Life and Times" and Wilde .

His favorite actresses are Luise Rainer , Katharine Hepburn , Meryl Streep and Sally Field.

He has openly discussed his struggles with depression and attempted suicide.

In February 2008, he began providing Stephen Frys Podgrams: free podcasts about his adventures, available via his official website.

On an episode of QI, a panelist, with reference to the topic at hand, he questioned Jo Brand about her previous work as a psychiatric nurse, asking "If someone had said to you they were God, what would you have done?" Jo Brand laughed and said "I probably would have punched him to the floor!" At which point Fry quipped "What a loss to the profession you were!".

In 2009, he earned 100,000 for a TV commercial for Marks & Spencer.

Despite his fame and charitable efforts, Stephen Fry has been very open and honest about the details of his less than respectable past which includes a brief stint in jail for credit card fraud and 15 years addicted to snorting coke (cocaine). In his recent autobiography he provides a list of places whose owners he offers his deepest apologies to for indulging in his illegal drug habit on the premises, a few of the places on this list were: Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, The Houses of Parliament, BBC HQ, ITV HQ and several military bases and headquarters.

He is a snooker fan and attends the final in Crucible Theatre in Sheffield every year.

He was a friend of the actor John Mills.

The e-mail of the species is more deadly than the mail.

How can one not be fond of something that the "Daily Mail" despises?,It is quite difficult to feel that I am placed somewhere between Alan,Bennett and the Queen Mother, a sort of public kitten.

It is true that I have a great admiration, sometimes only just short of,reverence, for the elegances and brilliances that have emerged from my,favourite address in the world: 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California,the home of Apple Computers.

I grew up in what seems now to me and to most cultural and broadcast,historians to have been a golden age in television.

I love television in this country. I love the range and richness of the,programming. I love its ambition, its scope, its innovation. I love the,tradition, the technological innovation, the gossip, the corporate,drama on the inside, the reach and influence on the outside. I admire,the talent and the commitment of so many working in the field. I love,everything about what television has been, what it still is and what it,might yet be. If I criticise anything about it, I hope you will be able,to see that I do so as with nationhood, from the point of view of love,not enmity.

There is as far as I know no profession in this country that likes to,talk about itself more than broadcasting.

Happiness is no respecter of persons.

It is a clich that most clichs are true, but then, like most clichs,that clich is untrue.

Will we never learn? Who knows? Religion. Shit it.

Most sodomy, most anal intercourse takes place between men and women.

Under the cloak of caring, you have designated homosexuality to be a,vicious, perverted disease.

Monster, scholar, lover of life, genius.

Homophobics are interested in making other people homophobic.

Gosh. Elliott G Spencer and I go into a room as two people, sign a book,and leave as one. Amazing.

[on homosexual marriage] It really makes a difference to know that one,is conjoined in a legal way.

My poor husband has to put up with the fact that BAFTA comes first.

The day life has so little to offer that I read the next Shirley,MacLaine book, disembowel me.

Self-pity will fulfill all the prophecies it makes and leaves only,itself.

If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn’t a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather. Try to understand the blackness, lethargy, hopelessness, and loneliness they’re going through. Be there for them when they come through the other side. It’s hard to be a friend to someone who’s depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do.

I have written it before and am not ashamed to write it again. 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.

I used many times to touch my own chest and feel, under its asthmatic quiver, the engine of the heart and lungs and blood and feel amazed at what I sensed was the enormity of the power I possessed. Not magical power, but real power. The power simply to go on, the power to endure, that is power enough, but I felt I had also the power to create, to add, to delight, to amaze and to transform.

Stop feeling sorry for yourself and you will be happy.

It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe, but not worth bothering with.

As I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters but me.

No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time.

Compromise is a stalling between two fools.

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

People who can change and change again are so much more reliable and happier than those who can’t,Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me.

Great writers, I discovered, were not to be bowed down before and worshipped, but embraced and befriended. Their names resounded through history not because they had massive brows and thought deep incomprehensible thoughts, but because they opened windows in the mind, they put their arms round you and showed you things you always knew but never dared to believe. Even if their names were terrifyingly foreign and intellectual sounding, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire or Cavafy, they turned out to be charming and wonderful and quite unalarming after all.

You are aware that what they do, they do for the world, and the results are, of course, magnificent. But when you read Douglas Adamsyou feel you are, perhaps, the only person in the world who really gets them. Just about everybody else admires them, of course, but no one really connects with them in the way you do It’s like falling in love. When an especially peachy Adams’ turn of phrase or epithet enters the eye and penetrates the brain, you want to tap the shoulder of the nearest stranger and share it. The stranger might laugh and seem to enjoy the writing, but you hug to yourself the thought that they didn’t quite understand its force and quality the way you do, just as your friends, thank heavens, don’t also fall in love with the person you are going on and on about to them.

Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.

The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane. Each sentence we produce, whether we know it or not, is a mongrel mouthful of Chaucerian, Shakespearean, Miltonic, Johnsonian, Dickensian and American. Military, naval, legal, corporate, criminal, jazz, rap and ghetto discourses are mingled at every turn. The French language, like Paris, has attempted, through its Academy, to retain its purity, to fight the advancing tides of Franglais and international prefabrication. English, by comparison, is a shameless whore.

Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise".

There is simply no limit to the tyrannical snobbery that otherwise decent people can descend into when it comes to music.

It does not suit the world to hear that people who are leading a high life, an enviable life, a privileged life are as miserable most days as anybody else, despite the fact that it must be obvious they would be - given that we are all agreed that money and fame do not bring happiness. Instead the world would prefer to enjoy the idea, against what it knows to be true, that wealth and fame do in fact insulate and protect against misery and it would rather we shut up if we are planning to indicate otherwise.

Sex without smiling is as sickly and as base as vodka and tonic without ice.

[his healing skills] . . lay in the ability to comfort, to comfort in the proper sense, to make strong, to fortify,A true thing, poorly expressed, is a lie.

This is what you have to understand. You grew up, you went to this school and that one, you made these friends and those. It was nothing. The future is a much bigger deal than the past, Adrian, a much bigger deal. Not just because it has babies in it, but because there are better people in it, who are better behaved and more fun to be with, the scenery is better, the weather is better, the rewards and thrills are better. But I really am not sure that you will ever. . .

Just let the words fly from your lips and your pen. Give them rhythm and depth and height and silliness. Give them filth and form and noble stupidity. Words are free and all words, light and frothy, firm and sculpted as they may be, bear the history of their passage from lip to lip over thousands of years. How they feel to us now tells us whole stories of our ancestors.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will always hurt me. Bones mend and become actually stronger in the very place they were broken and where they have knitted up; mental wounds can grind and ooze for decades and be re-opened by the quietest whisper.

I suppose this was the first time I had ever felt an urge not to be. Never an urge to die, far less an urge to put an end to myself - simply an urge not to be. This disgusting, hostile and unlovely world was not made for me, nor I for it.

I used to think it utterly normal that I suffered from “suicidal ideation” on an almost daily basis. In other words, for as long as I can remember, the thought of ending my life came to me frequently and obsessively.

I like to think of this little [newspaper] column as a brassière, or do I mean brasserie? Brazier, possibly. All three! A column that lifts, separates, supports, serves excellent cappuccino and crackles merrily with sweet-smelling old chestnuts.

There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphrys than to write poems, love-letters, novels and stories it seems. They whip out their Sharpies and take away and add apostrophes from public signs, shake their heads at prepositions which end sentences and mutter at split infinitives and misspellings, but do they bubble and froth and slobber and cream with joy at language? Do they ever let the tripping of the tips of their tongues against the tops of their teeth transport them to giddy euphoric bliss? Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it? Do they use language to seduce, charm, excite, please, affirm and tickle those they talk to? Do they? I doubt it. They’re too farting busy sneering at a greengrocer’s less than perfect use of the apostrophe. Well sod them to Hades. They think they’re guardians of language. They’re no more guardians of language than the Kennel Club is the guardian of dogkind.

We gave you a perfectly good language and you f***ed up.

I will defend the absolute value of Mozart over Miley Cyrus, of course I will, but we should be wary of false dichotomies. 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. 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.

Look at the kind of people who most object to the childishness and cheapness of celebrity culture. Does one really want to side with such apoplectic and bombastic bores? I should know, I often catch myself being one, and it isn’t pretty. I will defend the absolute value of Mozart over Miley Cyrus, of course I will, but we should be wary of false dichotomies. 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. 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. Monocultures are uninhabitably dull and end as deserts.

Anger fed him and clothed him and he owed it much.

Read it wisely, Little One, for the power of ignorance is great.

Those who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it.

Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.

They had been there. I had seen my mother’s anxious face, desperate to catch my eye and give me a warm smile. I had tried to smile back, but I had not known how. That old curse again. How to smile. If I smiled too broadly it might look like triumphalism; if I smiled too weakly it might look like a feeble bid for sympathy. If I smiled somewhere in between it would, I knew, look, as always, like plain smugness. Somehow I managed to bare my teeth in a manner that expressed, I hope, sorrow, gratitude, determination, shame, remorse and resolve.

The uncomfortable, as well as the miraculous, fact about the human mind is how it varies from individual to individual. The process of treatment can therefore be long and complicated. Finding the right balance of drugs, whether lithium salts, anti-psychotics, SSRIs or other kinds of treatment can be a very hit or miss heuristic process requiring great patience and classy, caring doctoring. Some patients would rather reject the chemical path and look for ways of using diet, exercise and talk-therapy. For some the condition is so bad that ECT is indicated. One of my best friends regularly goes to a clinic for doses of electroconvulsive therapy, a treatment looked on by many as a kind of horrific torture that isn’t even understood by those who administer it. This friend of mine is just about one of the most intelligent people I have ever met and she says, “I know. It ought to be wrong. But it works. It makes me feel better. I sometimes forget my own name, but it makes me happier. It’s the only thing that works. ” For her. Lord knows, I’m not a doctor, and I don’t understand the brain or the mind anything like enough to presume to judge or know better than any other semi-informed individual, but if it works for her…. well then, it works for her. Which is not to say that it will work for you, for me or for others.

There were people who believed their opportunities to live a fulfilled life were hampered by the number of Asians in England, by the existance of a royal family, by the volume of traffic that passed by their house, by the malice of trade unions, by the power of callous employers, by the refusal of the health service to take their condition seriously, by communism, by capitalism, by atheism, by anything, in fact, but their own futile, weak-minded failure to get a fucking grip.

There are young men and women up and down the land who happily (or unhappily) tell anyone who will listen that they don’t have an academic turn of mind, or that they aren’t lucky enough to have been blessed with a good memory, and yet can recite hundreds of pop lyrics and reel off any amount of information about footballers. Why? Because they are interested in those things. They are curious. If you are hungry for food, you are prepared to hunt high and low for it. If you are hungry for information it is the same. Information is all around us, now more than ever before in human history. You barely have to stir or incommode yourself to find things out. The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.

there is no reason why anyone should understand how it works… and of course no reason why anyone should care … unless you are curious, in which case I love you, for curiosity about the world and all its corners is a beautiful thing.

Forget ideas, Mr. Author. What kind of pen do you use?,Thos who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it.

Mental health is one of the last great taboos.

And if the best you can do is quote the Bible in defence of your prejudice, then have the humility to be consistent. The same book that exhorts against the abomination of one man lying with another also contains exhortations against the eating of pork and shell-fish and against menstruating women daring to come near holy places. It’s no good functionalistically claiming that kosher diet had its local, meteorological purposes now defunct, or that the prejudice against ovulation can be dispensed with as superstition, the Bible that you bash us with tells you that much of what you do is unclean: don’t pick and choose with a Revealed Text — or if you do, pick and choose the good bits, the bits that say things like ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’, or ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’.

I was at a dinner party many years ago,sitting along from Tom Stoppard, who in those days smoked not just between courses,but between mouthfuls. An American woman watched in disbelief. "And you so intelligent!""Excuse me?" said tom"Knowing those things are going to kill you" she said "and still you do it. ""How differently I might behave" Tom said, "if immortality were an option,Seriousness is no more a guarantee of truth, insight, authenticity or probity, than humour is a guarantee of superficiality and stupidity.

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

Taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once. It is an insult to creation not to experience it fully. Temperance is wickedness.

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

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. .