Stephen Fry: When I was seventeen I had already tried fourteen different jobs, married twice, fathered many many many many children, eaten a perfectly enormous quantity of food over a long time period, been weaned off six types of class A dangerous drug, given up smoking, taken it up again, given it up again, taken it up again, given taking it up and taken giving it up again and again and again and again. By the time I was twenty, alcohol had never passed my lips, yet I was a reckless and predatory alcoholic: my life was in pieces, my marriages were shattered, my children lay in ruins, I was paying alimony along the sinuses, behind the dark interior passages of the skull and through the nose. But at thirty, at thirty came the chance to redeem a bin-liner of broken promises. If I didn't take that chance what would I be? What would I become? Just another friendless acid spot on the back buttock of a weeping society. So I took it, took the chance, picked up the ball and ran, went for it, threw caution to the teeth of the gale, never looked back, just keep running, I did it. Forget the past, there's nothing there, not even memories, just a road you never travelled unwinding backwards to a place you never came from, where fruit grows on trees you never climbed, in an orchard where you lost your virginity to a boy called Timothy who died of Horlicks poisoning before you were born. No answers there...
Hugh Laurie: tephen, Stephen, Stephen, Stephen.
Stephen Fry: Yes?
Hugh Laurie: Go and have a lie down.
Stephen Fry: OK. [walks off.].
Hugh Laurie: Well bring back hanging, I say. These tumble dryers are useless.
Stephen Fry: I was very shocked when my son told me his boyfriend was a homosexual.
Stephen Fry: Ah, I fancy I detect a wrinkle of concern on your otherwise smooth and toboggonable brow. Business is not what it was, nor even what it is. It may not even be what it will be. We shall see if it is. If it isn't, I may have to consider an early retirement. Mr Dalliard, I'm drivelling!
Stephen Fry: I think animal testing is a terrible idea. They get all nervous and give silly answers.
Hugh Laurie: [Walking away.] No I can't stop, I'm afraid. My wife is being towed away.
Presenter: Did your children see the...?
Hugh Laurie: No they didn't. They didn't see it. But only thanks to the purest good fortune that they don't happen to have been born yet, otherwise I dread to think what damage may have been caused. It was simply disgusting.
Stephen Fry: Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine on a pair of boxer shorts, it's a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, the warm wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot.
