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To be human and to be adult means constantly to be in the grip of opposing emotions, to have daily to reconcile apparently conflicting tensions. I want this, but need that. I cherish this, but I adore its opposite too.

Stephen Fry

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Stephen Fry
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 1
Actor
Autobiographer
Comedian
Director
Film Actor
Film Director
Improviser
Journalist
Narrator
Novelist
Performing Artist
Hampstead Village
Stephen John Fry
Human
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Humans
Opposites
Reconcile
Need
Emotions
Opposing
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Adore
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Constantly
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Adult
Conflicting
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Tension
Tensions

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Having been an actor and a writer for so long - 20 years or so - I felt that it would be daft to go to one's grave without having directed. It's a natural extension of writing and acting, and so I knew it would happen one day.
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I get an urge, like a pregnant elephant, to go away and give birth to a book.
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Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.
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How can one not be fond of something that the Daily Mail despises?
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I have to mime at parties when everyone sings Happy Birthday... Mime or mumble and rumble and growl and grunt so deep that only moles, manta rays and mushrooms can hear me.
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If you think you're going to have an eternity in which you can talk to Mozart and Chopin and Schopenhauer on a cloud and learn stuff and you know really get to grips with knowledge and understanding and so you won't bother now, I think it's a terrible, a terrible mistake.
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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.
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Hell, I am young. I am free. My teeth are clean. The sun shines. To hell with everything else
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The part of [Oscar] Wilde was exceptionally important to me the man, his achievements, his wisdom, but his downfall, his disgrace and the tragic and bitter end to it have always fascinated, appalled and attracted me since childhood. It was he who first in some measure vindicated my sexuality.
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[...] 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. It was alien to me and I to it.
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Perhaps the greatest definition I think of character and quality is people who when they're truly great rather than making you feel that tall they make you feel that tall, that they're greatness as it were improves you.
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It is easy to forget that the most important aspect of comedy, after all, its great saving grace, is its ambiguity. You can simultaneously laugh at a situation, and take it seriously.
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Lectures broke into one's day and were clearly a terrible waste of time, necessary no doubt if you were reading law or medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English, the natural thing to do was talk a lot, listen to music, drink coffee and wine, read books, and go to plays, perhaps be in plays.
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If you have been, I'm glad you've stopped.
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I believe in kindness and niceness and lots of spiritual things, but the real intellectual rigor and quest of logic is something that I'm afraid takes incredibly hard work and we live in an age in which hard work is if not actively deprecated or denigrated it is run away from or ignored.
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Philosophy is an odd thing. When we use the word in everyday speech, you know, you sometimes hear it hilariously.
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