It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.
An original idea. That can’t be too hard. The library must be full of them.
The alarm in the morning? Well, I have an old tape of Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in a perfectly transcendent version in Shubert’s seventh symphony. And I’ve rigged it up so that at exactly 7:30 every morning it falls from the ceiling onto my face.
My first words, as I was being born […] I looked up at my mother and said, ‘that’s the last time I’m going up one of those.
Gaia visited her daughter Mnemosyne, who was busy being unpronounceable.
Philosophy is an odd thing. When we use the word in everyday speech, you know, you sometimes hear it hilariously.
There are times when I’m doing QI and I’m going, ‘Ha ha, yeah, yeah,’ and inside I’m going ‘I want to fucking die. I … want … to … fucking … die.'(Source : RHLSTP #18 – @87min32s)
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.
It’s now very common to hear people say, ‘I’m rather offended by that.’ As if that gives them certain rights. It’s actually nothing more… than a whine. ‘I find that offensive.’ It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. ‘I am offended by that.’ Well, so fucking what.[I saw hate in a graveyard — Stephen Fry, The Guardian, 5 June 2005]