Stephen Fry
Aug. 9th, 2005 10:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
riontelFew quotes.
The Liar.
Hockney seems to me to paint in two styles. Wild and natural or cold and clinical. I seem to remember remarking that there are two kinds of Hockney. Field Hockney and Ice Hockney.
English boarding schools have much to recommend them. If boys are going to be adolescent, and science has failed to come up with a way of stopping them, then much better to herd them together and let them get on with it in private.
'Everything in my life ends in id... Everything begins in id as well...'
'Everything begins with "I", you mean. Which is ego.'
'You know I hate intellectuals.'
'You mean you hate people who are cleverer than you are.'
That's an interesting point in the sense of not being interesting at all.
Sophistication is not an admired quality. Not only at school. Nobody likes it anywhere. In England at any rate.
You are a fraud, a charlatan and a shyster. My favorite kind of person, in fact.
An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.
He found himself playing a drama in which he cast himself as God and the potatoes as human. This one he hurled into outer darkness, that one he sent to be garnered home. <...> He wasn't sure if it was better to be a rotten potato or a healthy one, whether he would rather be safely bunched up in a warm bag with the goody-goodies or be thrown over the side and ploughed back into the soil. One thing was certain, either of those fates was preferable to being God.
'But before I realized my error, I had stumbled across the manuscript.'
'You stumbled across a bundle of papers wrapped in a blanket hidden on top of a bookcase?''
'I've got some wine.'
'Very nice. I wonder how they got the cat to sit on the bottle.'
How stupid would you like me to be, sir? Very stupid or only quite stupid?
Old Professors never die, they merely lose their faculties.
He may dearly want to be my enemy, he may beg on bended knee for open hostility of the most violent kind, but it takes two to tangle. I choose my own enemies.
Out, out! Get out! Out before I slash your throat with a knife and hang you dripping with blood from the flag-pole. Out, before I pull your guts from your body and stuff them down your mouth. Out, before I become mildly irritated.
'Did I really say that? "A genius for deceit and chicanery"? Did I really? And we had only just been introduced. How rude.'
The Hippopotamus
When push-off comes to shove-off, a man must have a reason to get out of bed in the morning, something more than the threat of bedsores at any rate.
Simon, for whom poetry is a closed book in a locked cupboard in a high attic in a lonely house in a remote hamlet in a distant land...
There has been a relentless and disturbing rise in moral standards over the years. It worries me.
Revenge
"Seventeen fir cones constitute a heap, but sixteen do not?"
<...>
"There we have the problem. The world is full of heaps like this, Ned. This is good, this is not good. This is bad luck, but this is a towering injustice. This is mass murder and this is genocide. This is child killing, this abortion. This is lawful intercourse, this is statutory rape. There is nothing but a single fir cone's difference between them, sometimes just the one lonely only little cone telling us that it represents the difference between heaven and hell."
The Liar.
Hockney seems to me to paint in two styles. Wild and natural or cold and clinical. I seem to remember remarking that there are two kinds of Hockney. Field Hockney and Ice Hockney.
English boarding schools have much to recommend them. If boys are going to be adolescent, and science has failed to come up with a way of stopping them, then much better to herd them together and let them get on with it in private.
'Everything in my life ends in id... Everything begins in id as well...'
'Everything begins with "I", you mean. Which is ego.'
'You know I hate intellectuals.'
'You mean you hate people who are cleverer than you are.'
That's an interesting point in the sense of not being interesting at all.
Sophistication is not an admired quality. Not only at school. Nobody likes it anywhere. In England at any rate.
You are a fraud, a charlatan and a shyster. My favorite kind of person, in fact.
An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.
He found himself playing a drama in which he cast himself as God and the potatoes as human. This one he hurled into outer darkness, that one he sent to be garnered home. <...> He wasn't sure if it was better to be a rotten potato or a healthy one, whether he would rather be safely bunched up in a warm bag with the goody-goodies or be thrown over the side and ploughed back into the soil. One thing was certain, either of those fates was preferable to being God.
'But before I realized my error, I had stumbled across the manuscript.'
'You stumbled across a bundle of papers wrapped in a blanket hidden on top of a bookcase?''
'I've got some wine.'
'Very nice. I wonder how they got the cat to sit on the bottle.'
How stupid would you like me to be, sir? Very stupid or only quite stupid?
Old Professors never die, they merely lose their faculties.
He may dearly want to be my enemy, he may beg on bended knee for open hostility of the most violent kind, but it takes two to tangle. I choose my own enemies.
Out, out! Get out! Out before I slash your throat with a knife and hang you dripping with blood from the flag-pole. Out, before I pull your guts from your body and stuff them down your mouth. Out, before I become mildly irritated.
'Did I really say that? "A genius for deceit and chicanery"? Did I really? And we had only just been introduced. How rude.'
The Hippopotamus
When push-off comes to shove-off, a man must have a reason to get out of bed in the morning, something more than the threat of bedsores at any rate.
Simon, for whom poetry is a closed book in a locked cupboard in a high attic in a lonely house in a remote hamlet in a distant land...
There has been a relentless and disturbing rise in moral standards over the years. It worries me.
Revenge
"Seventeen fir cones constitute a heap, but sixteen do not?"
<...>
"There we have the problem. The world is full of heaps like this, Ned. This is good, this is not good. This is bad luck, but this is a towering injustice. This is mass murder and this is genocide. This is child killing, this abortion. This is lawful intercourse, this is statutory rape. There is nothing but a single fir cone's difference between them, sometimes just the one lonely only little cone telling us that it represents the difference between heaven and hell."
