Actors From England

"One of the astounding qualities of that family was their capacity to fill innocent bystanders with thoughts of murder."

"All my life I have entirely missed the point; and the turning, as I also have no sense of direction. This long period of uncertainty in the twilight land of the fuddled (it is now more than sixty years) has taken its toll."

"All my life I have felt myself to be on the edge of things. All my life I have suffered from bad dreams. All my life I have had difficulty in knowing whether I am awake or in a nightmare."

"The poor don't really like that ticket. They are desperate to get away and join the rich, and have glossy hair, bright eyes and white teeth. The rich live longer and can afford to be charming."

"Poverty can curdle the libido and corrode civilized thoughts. One's sense of humour vanishes, to be replaced by a curry-spoiling sarcasm as one's Mr Hyde emerges from the swamp of the subconscious."

"Being poor is a little like having an earache over a Bank Holiday. All you can think about is the pain and how long it will be before a healing hand can be found to take away the anguish."

"She smiled at me, arsenically."

"Once a man next to me found the handle of a radiator in his mashed potato; he said nothing, merely moving it to the side of his plate after sucking the mashed potato off it first. Nobody else said anything either. If the truth was known several of us were probably jealous."

""Stay calm, sir," I cried. "Don't excite yourself, it could mean death." He took me at my word and instantly fell inert. I didn't know whether he was obeying me or had died."

"I didn't care as an ex-ballet dancer wrote and told me she had seen the production and fallen in love with my legs. She said that in other circumstances she could have lived happily with my legs but that she only had a small flat in Holland Park."

"We are all quite capable of believing in anything as long as it's improbable."

"I am used to being mistaken for Miriam Margolyes; Private Eye noticed that, and once I was even taken for Gertrude Stein. But that was at Chelsea Flower Show where uncertainty of identity is in the air."

"Not everybody knows that looking at people in 'a funny way' is the commonest cause of sudden murder. I happen to know that because I read a Home Office brochure once."

"It is part of my duty as a decent member of my local hamlet to mow the grass in front of the church. It's a pleasant little task and mowing is a favorite activity of mine; it gives me a lot of pleasure to make the churchyard look tidy. I sometimes pause at the grave of someone or other and speculate what he might have been like when he was alive, but gravestones don't tell much."

"He told me he was having the time of his life and then fell to the floor unconscious. I didn't take this too personally, although he was not the first person to collapse while talking to me; to tell the truth it has happened quite often."

"Most of my ideas were rejected and I got used to it. One can get fond of almost anything, even rejection."

"Bob Holmes, the script editor, did laugh and filled his pipe so that he could create a smoke screen between us while he turned the idea down."

"Jim Acheson, our designer, told me I looked like his Auntie Wyn and I have never forgotten it. I wondered if it was the way I walked or wore my hat, but Jim just said that I had some indefinable air of an aunt. It was then I began to hope that one day I might play Lady Bracknell."

"It was no problem for me to say I came from another world and could go back and forth in time in my emphysemic old Tardis which was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside. Problem? For me who believed in Guardian Angels and was convinced that pigs were possessed by devils after their New Testament encounter with God's son? It was easy and I loved it."

"Playing Doctor Who came as a great surprise to me. I had no idea that I would enjoy it so much. All that was required of me was to be able to speak complete gobbledygook with conviction."

"My old skill at self-delusion overrode my doubts as I told myself that Dexter probably believed in me. I could believe anything then. I still can as long as it is improbable."

"Living in an institution, rumours of change can make life more bearable, and starting rumours can be a wonderful pleasure for those without much hope. The National Theatre was like that."

"The only imperfection in life then was that we didn't really have much money."

"About ten days later, it being the time of year when the National collected down and outs to walk on and understudy I arrived at the head office of the National Theatre in Aquinas Street in Waterloo."

"But we can't escape into the future like we can escape into the past. So those of us who are not certain of things, and there are an awful lot of us, often rush back to the past. And each one has a particular past he prefers to the present. Sometimes I feel that any past is preferable to the present."

"We even copied the way the Americans walked, though Father Leonard didn't like that bit of admiration. He disapproved of rolling buttocks."

"But it was drama, high drama: fires at night, the fires that burned people's houses away; bombs fell and left exotically shaped fragments in the form of shrapnel. And we collected it and traded it. As long as we were not hurt -- and I wasn't -- life seemed wonderful."

""Would you like to go to New Zealand to do a commercial?" That's the sort of question an actor likes to hear from his agent in freezing mid -January."

"It was in the church that I got to love shadows and dark corners, musty cupboards and creaking floorboards. I was a perfect recruit for the Addams family. Cobwebs made me whimper with joy."

"Who was it that designed brown envelopes? I feel sure that he hated people whoever he was. I wonder where he's buried?"

"The theatre couldn't match what was going on in a court of law or at football grounds. The theatre has never been able to match what goes on anywhere, that's why so few people go."

"Of course, for a lot of people, death was a welcome change. Grinding poverty takes the edge off most things, including life."

"Tom Fleming, the eldest, was said to look like King George V, and indeed, was often mistaken for His Majesty when in the vicinity of Scotland Road, Anfield Road or Lime Street. Why people would suspect that the King might be working in Tate and Lyle's sugar factory is beyond me, but there you are."

"One tortured soul I know who suffers from amazingly premature ejaculation — I mean so premature that he hasn't got any children after eleven years of marriage — was told by the priest that it was probably a blessing in disguise. What a piece of advice to give to a poor sod who comes off at the sound of his wife's car in the drive."

"The notion that God was everywhere put paid to any possible peace of mind by the time I was six."

"The chaos of our lives suited me; I don't think I wanted it to end."

"These days when I see a child in Waitrose and smile and say, "Hello, are you going to visit your Mum in her sheltered accommodation when you grow up?" it provokes glistening eyes and hollow laughter. And if you pursue it with, "Or are you going to be a drug dealer?" it may result in a snub."

"Much water has flown under Tiber's bridges, carrying away splendour and mystery from Rome, since the pontificate of Pius XII. The essentials, I know, remain firmly entrenched and I find the post-Conciliar Mass simpler and generally better than the Tridentine; but the banality and vulgarity of the translations which have ousted the sonorous Latin and little Greek are of a super-market quality which is quite unacceptable. Hand-shaking and embarrassed smiles or smirks have replaced the older courtesies; kneeling is out, queueing is in, and the general tone is rather like a BBC radio broadcast for tiny tots (so however will they learn to put away childish things?). The clouds of incense have dispersed, together with many hidebound, blinkered and repressive attitudes, and we are left with social messages of an almost over-whelming progressiveness. The Church has proved she is not moribund. "All shall be well," I feel, "and all manner of things shall be well," so long as the God who is worshipped is the God of all ages, past and to come, and not the idol of Modernity, so venerated by some of our bishops, priests and mini-skirted nuns."

"...nothing is desperately important and the joy of life is just looking at it."

"There seems to be no end to the senseless wickedness done on this little planet in a minor solar system, and we puny mortals appear to be decreasing in importance so far as the universe is concerned."

"On the subject of biblical texts and examples to why you can't do certain things with your body that you wish to, I find that absolutely absurd. I've always been extremely uncomfortable with the idea in any society that the belief is based on revealed truth, that's to say on a text like a Bible or a Qur'an, or whatever it is. It seems to me that the greatness of our culture, for all its incredible faults, is that we have grown up on the Greek ideal of discovering the truth, discovering by looking around us, by empirical experiment, by the combination of the experience of generations of ancestors who have contributed to our sum knowledge of the way the world works, and so on. And to have that snatched away and to be told what to think by a book, however great it may be in places, this is a book that says you can sell your daughter into slavery, it's a book that bans menstruating women from within miles of temples. The fact that it also says that for one man to lie with another man is an abomination, is no more made relevant or important than the fact that you can't eat shellfish."

"A stupid person's idea of a clever person"

"Aquinas and Augustus of Hippo both proposed this extraordinary idea that babies who were unbaptised would not know heaven. They also proposed the idea of purgatory which doesn’t exist in The Bible. There’s absolutely no evidence for it. However, what an extraordinary brilliant coup to imagine such a thing as purgatory. That a soul needs to be prayed for, in order to go to heaven. In order to turn left when he enters the aeroplane of heaven and get a first class seat. That, he needs to be prayed for. And many hundreds, indeed over a thousand years, you’ll be amazed what generous terms those prayers came at. Sometimes as little as two thirds of a year’s salary. Could ensure that a dead loved one would go to heaven. And money could ensure that your baby. Your dead child, your dead uncle, your dead mother, could go to heaven. And if you were rich enough, you could have a chantry built and monks would permanently sing prayers so that that existence in heaven for the child would go up and up and up until they were at the table of the Lord themselves."

"She has a very intense poetic mind. That's what makes it — that voice that comes in."

"I was called by my agent, who said "Would you like to record a track with Kate Bush?" To which there is only F-ing one possible answer. Unless its me singing. I said, "She does know I can't sing?" "No-no-no, it would be voicing, saying words for snow. … I still can't believe it says "Kate Bush-Stephen Fry.""

"I actually got a Ugandan Minister to say, on camera— he's the Minister of Ethics and Integrity, it's the only such ministry in the world— and I said to him, "Look, even if these three utterly false supports on which you base your homophobia are true, which they aren't, there's so much more to worry about in your country than the odd gay person going to bed with the other gay person. For example, you have almost an epidemic of child rape in this country, which is just frightening." And he said, "Ah, but it is the right kind of child rape." I said, "That was on camera. Do you know that was on camera?" He said, "Yes." I said, "Can you just explain what you meant?" "Well, it is men raping girls. Which is natural.""

"Wit can be beautiful, because it expresses and distils an idea."

"A cut glass English accent can fool unsuspecting Americans into detecting a brilliance that isn't there."

"I gather a repulsive nobody writing in a paper no one of any decency would be seen dead with has written something loathesome and inhumane."

"Weak watery sun, but sun nonetheless. Why does it take me nearly 2 hours just to get through the morning emails? Pah, poo and pants."