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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.

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
Great
Grace
Excellence
Comedy
Saving
Situation
Seriously
Forget
Laughter
Funny
Aspect
Easy
Laugh
Take
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Simultaneously
Important
Humor
Ambiguity

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A month's salary, deep regret, the telephone number of some foul rehab clinic and my lance was free.
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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
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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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I think I'm most nervous about revealing how nervous I have always been. People think me calm, confident, poised. Inside I'm a jelly.
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You think homosexuality is disgusting? Then, it follows as the night the day, that you find sex disgusting, for there is nothing done between two men or two women that is, by any objective standard, different from that which is done between a man and a woman.
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All the big words -virtue, justice, truth, ...- are dwarfed by the greatness of kindness
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Philosophy is an odd thing... There is no particular Socratic or Dimechian or Kantian way to live your life. They don't offer ethical codes and standards by which to live your life.
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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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You can't reason yourself back into cheerfulness any more than you can reason yourself into an extra six inches in height.
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The Gay News critic wrote that I 'carried the lilt of the Irish without the brogue'.
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If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people in the world?
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One of the reasons I love the online world is that although that exists in abundance you can choose absolutely which part of the online world you want to live in. You can make your own kingdom in that sense.
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As if a device can function if it has no style. As if a device can be called stylish that does not function superbly... yes, beauty matters. Boy, does it matter. It is not surface, it is not an extra, it is the thing itself.
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Money is to Everything as an Aeroplane is to Australia. The aeroplane isn't Australia, but it remains the only practical way we know of reaching it. So perhaps, metonymically, the aeroplane is Australia after all.
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My father was all brain and little heart.
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Wine can be a better teacher than ink, and banter is often better than books
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Money no longer has any meaning. Civilization is coming to an end. If not the destruction of the world, it's an endless stalemate.
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The performance of buggery is no more inevitable a part of homosexuality than an orange syllabub is an inevitable part of a dinner: some may clamour for it and instantly demand a second helping, some are not interested, some decide they will try it once and then instantly vomit.
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When you've seen a nude infant doing a backward somersault you know why clothing exists.
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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.
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