Stephen Fry Quotes About Language

Quotes about: Language

• 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.

  Stephen Fry

  Beauty, Depression, Laughter

  Stephen Fry (2011). “Moab Is My Washpot”, p.93, Random House

• I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.

  Stephen Fry

  Tolerance, Lovers, Language

• There is no right language or wrong language any more than there are right or wrong clothes.

  Stephen Fry

  Clothes, Language

• I have written it before and am not ashamed to write it again. Without Wodehouse I am not sure that I would be a tenth of what I am today -- whatever that may be. In my teenage years, his writings awoke me to the possibilities of language. His rhythms, tropes, tricks and mannerisms are deep within me. But more than that, he taught me something about good nature. It is enough to be benign, to be gentle, to be funny, to be kind.

  Stephen Fry

  Teenage, Writing, Years

• The English language is an arsenal of weapons. If you are going to brandish them without checking to see whether or not they are loaded, you must expect to have them explode in your face from time to time.

  Stephen Fry

  Faces, Weapons, Language

• The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane.

  Stephen Fry

  London, Sacred, Royal

  Stephen Fry (2006). “The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within”, p.551, Penguin

• We gave you a perfectly good language and you f***ed up.

  Stephen Fry

  Perfectly Good, Language

• The worst of this sorry bunch of semi-educated losers are those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs. How dense and deaf to language development do you have to be? If you don’t like nouns becoming verbs, then for heaven’s sake avoid Shakespeare who made a doing-word out of a thing-word every chance he got. He TABLED the motion and CHAIRED the meeting in which nouns were made verbs

  Stephen Fry

  Sorry, Heaven, Language Development

• I am aware of the technical distinction between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’, and between ‘uninterested’ and ‘disinterested’ and ‘infer’ and ‘imply’, but none of these are of importance to me. ‘None of these are of importance,’ I wrote there, you’ll notice – the old pedantic me would have insisted on “none of them is of importance”. Well I’m glad to say I’ve outgrown that silly approach to language

  Stephen Fry

  Silly, Language, Distinction

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