YouSaid · the spoken record

Stephen Fry

lines on the record: 110
first: 2022-12-05
most recent: 2022-12-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So it's the variation between doing a documentary and then suddenly having to spend four or five months just working on a book and then doing some slutty piece of TV or film with big stars in it feeling like, ooh, I'm in Hollywood, you know. That I'm quoting the morning show slack because that's the least sloppy thing I've ever done”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Honestly pleasure, the fact that I still enjoyed it so much, that when I met new people who wanted me to do a new thing like this dinosaur program, I'm doing dinosaur, doing this new technology, being with the dinosaurs. So exciting. It was just a whole new thing for me. And I'd never done anything like it. And so I just said yes. And even though it meant like, am I going to get it? How am I going to get a week to be in that studio and do this and enough stuff and prepare for it and so on? It turned out to be a wonderful program and a unique kind of technology demonstrating these dinos. So that is an example. It's just, and similarly doing this Apple TV show, which I'm doing now in America called The Morning Show, which is good fun. And it just occasion it's the thrill of the variation”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Driver is worried about getting me back in time. I understand Thank you, darling. Bless you. We're having such a good time. I had no idea how the time was passing.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So embarrassed. Shakespeare calling, saying, Could you stop quoting me? Oh, it's my sister. It might be important. Joe, yes, sorry. I'm still at the, oh God, am I late? I am. Yes, you're quite right”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that's probably the, I mean, otherwise, of course, there are regrets in life because as you get to, I'm now from the 25th of August nearly your birthday at Ommonds, I was my birth 24th of August, from that day onwards I was closer to 70 than 60, because it was my 65th birthday on the 24th of August. So as you move towards the seer, the yellow leaf, as Shakespeare put it, oh,”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Silly of me, but yeah, I mean, that's probably the biggest hole in my life experience. I've been fortunate enough to have done so many things and to experience so much and met so many people I've been thrilled to meet and had opportunities that are just unbelievable, really. And of course I've had opportunities. I suppose to have had children. I mean, I could have sorted something out. I could have, and, you know, Elliot and I could, you know, we talked about it a bit, but we never talked about it to the extent of right, so we're going to a clinic tomorrow to talk this through to some expert. We never quite got that far. It was always just wouldn't it?”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they'll go, well, no, I've got kids. I said, Oh, do you hate them then? You hate your children. So you don't want them to have a nice world. Oh, I don't know. I mean, yeah, that's fine. And they'll go, oh, look, don't be stupid. And I get, well,”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's an amazing thought. I mean, there is a part of me that obviously feels, I say obviously, that feels in another world if I'd timed things right, and might have had children, and that's an experience that an enormous number of my fellow humans undergo, and it clearly gives pleasure I have many godchildren now going to. Nieces and nephews and great nieces and great nephews. But I'll never experience a child growing up. And that, I mean, it's... Slight sadness it's it allows me fantastic ironic sarcastic in fact conversations with people sometimes where someone goes all this nonsense about global warming and I go no I'm with you I don't have children either so I don't care what happens to the world”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I almost wept at how beautiful an idea that was. I know it's so obvious we live in a ridiculous crass commercial world where we score everything by its monetary value. But to say we're only allowed to give each other things we found or made. And so we'd found this stone and this piece of wood or driftwood or whatever it was, and he was going to make something out of it. And his parents would be thrilled to have it because you've given them time and concentration. But you've also had the pleasure yourself of doing the making. So maybe someone listing will say to their family, hey, Christmas is coming up. We're only allowed to give each other things we found and made. And especially at a time of financial crisis, who wants to go into this slightly sick making nonsense of just going into shops and spending vast sums of money on shiny things. When you might just find a piece of driftwood or something that looks like a hedgehog and turn it into a piece.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Weapons Laboratory during the Vietnam War, and unfortunately there was a security guardian there who got killed, although they tried to do it when it was empty. So they've been on the lamb from the FBI for like 15, 20 years. That's the back story. Anyway, that means that they don't have much and they're constantly having to go on the move when the FBI might be close. And River Finity's character is a musical genius as it happens, not as relevant to this story, but he meets this girl and they start to fall for each other. And at one point they're walking along the beach and he's picking things up and says, oh, this might do. And she says, what's that? And he says, in our family, for Christmas or birthdays, we're only allowed to give something we found or made.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of my favorite films is a film called Running On Empty, Sydney Lamette film with River Phoenix and Judd Hirsch and various others in it. And it's about this family that are on the run because they attacked her.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's immensely important to get that blend. And one of the ways to create it is, I think, not to do art, because that's just too frightening, but to do crafts. And that can include painting. It can be painting by numbers. It can be just a general script.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember Rowan Atkinson said to me once, years ago, he's a very wise man, and indeed and thinks a lot, very, very thoughtful. And he said, and I'm sure he wasn't the first to say it, and there are many different names for this. He said, but it only ever works on stage if you are relaxed. But it only ever works on stage if you are concentrating. If you concentrate without being relaxed, you're just stiff, and you're trying too hard. If you relax without concentrating, you're all over the place. But when both happen at once, you are master of time and space, and you are in control, you are concentrating on every detail and every second of the audience's response, and your timing is perfect, and yet you are relaxed enough to allow them to enjoy it without feeling any strain. Sportsman call that being in the zone”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, people have tried to define. I mean, an artisan, a craftsman, Can make the same thing again and again identically, and it's genius, they're making four chairs. Each chair is the same. An artist never does the same thing again. They might have a theme that they do, so you can get a lot of artists who like to paint a particular subject, whether it's beddling field terriers, famous Scottish artists used to do, Craigie Acheson. He liked to do little Bedlington Terriers, and he liked, there's usually a star somewhere, but everyone is different. Everyone is a variation on a theme. Whereas an artisan is happy to make things that are perfect and the same each time a craftsman. But they're both good for the mind. In fact, probably being a craftsman is better for the mind.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We, the flesh this case we have, dies and rots, and we know this, and most we don't particularly like to be reminded of it. Artists find it the most fascinating thing in the world. So even if it's Van Gogh showing the petals falling off the sunflower, there's death in there, and as for Francis Bacon, and indeed Damon Hearst, and almost all painters, they paint death. They paint the truth about what we are becoming. And painting is sometimes the last bastion against death. I'm going to make something permanent because everything else dies. Again, Tutnas, Shakespeare's sonnets, you know. This will last. Everything else will die, but this poem will stay here. I made something permanent against death, decay, entropy, all the horrors of the universe that drag us down. You know, my nipples are dropping too in.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The kind of education I've had and that has privileged art above all things, but art is special to me and it has a special place and does special things. It's usually very simple and that's the genius of an artist. We die”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't have the artistic drive to make it something out of me. There's a fantastic confidence and supreme almost contempt for society that artists have. And that's why they're so unpopular with the Daily Males and the bourgeois people because they don't please, they don't provide what is comfortable or easy and what people would like or pretty it's always, oh, doesn't disgusting of throwing a pot of paint into the public's face. That was said one hundred and fifty years ago. You know, it's always been thus and artists are special, I think. I mean, I like makers or craftsmen, artisans, you know, who make beautiful things, whether it's shoes or Tom Daly knitting a nice pullover, whatever it might be, is a beautiful thing to see. But art is, to me at least, and it may be pardoned.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The aim is to see delight in the face, but for you, it's to make something that matters to you. And if it disgusts people or horrifies them, you're often full of glee. It's not that you deliberately make them to hate it. There are enough people who love it to make you extremely rich. The time he was only slightly rich, but now, of course, it's worth a huge amount. And I said, that's what a real artist is. And my other artist friends, not all from that same generation, Maggie Hambling was a wonderful painter in Suffolk, and she's done my portrait several times or whatever. And she's a real artist. There's a toughness about her, a refusal to compromise, an absolute, what's central is her and her work. And that's true of artists. Artists are bloody-minded. They bite the hand that feeds them. I'm pretty easy going if a commissioner wants me to do something. I'll ask him how he'd like it done. I'll try and put my own voice into it, my own tone into it.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is a really good question, and I always used to say no. I was very friendly in their heyday. Well, I still am with, for example, Damien Hearst in the 90s. I was very much an habitua of the Groucho Club and the Tracy Emmons and Damian Hearst would come in along with the Oasis and the Blurs and so on. It was very much the place where those incredibly energetic and new kinds of artist were dissembled. And, you know, I'd get drunk with Damien a lot. And I would sometimes say I want to be an artist. And he'd say, you are an artist. Anybody can be an artist. I said, no, they can't. He said, what do you mean? I said, and I would say, I'm an entertainer. I'm frankly a bit bourgeois. I want to please people. And if I don't please them, I get upset. I've done it wrong. For me,”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For some reason in my head, you know, the Protestant work ethic, the Jewish work ethic, call it what you like, is the one that says, you know, sitting alone, concentrating until bubbles of blood come out of your ears. That's work. Acting, as Shakespeare called it, is play. He was a playwright and he called actors players.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those who create their own work by they write it. They write the songs. They last forever if you write the song, Paul McCartney or whatever. I mean, you just think even something like when you see that postcode lottery and who's that knocking at my door and you think that's Paul McCartney when he wrote that cannot have been thinking but he wrote and every day he writes to this day because that's what he is that somehow that's the voice in him telling him that's what real work is is the writing and the creating and I love acting and I love presenting and reading audiobooks and things like that immense fun but the real work is always sitting in front of the blinking cursor and writing things and everything else is gravy and fantastic gravy at that not because it's easier and”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the first reason, and it would be the same if you spoke to a certain kind of musician, is because I write. And I have always written since I was a little boy, I ruse to write stories. And when I then was at Cambridge and there was this thing of comedy, it was natural with you and on my own to write monologues and sketches, to perform. And because I'd written them, I sort of wrote them for myself to perform. But the writing was at the bottom of it all. And then acting jobs on their own came along, which I didn't write or other people wrote, or I could just sort of add bits of writing to. But I was always a writer. And if you look at musicians, the reason we venerate Bowie and Elton John and Lennon Cohen, whoever it is, they write their music. It doesn't matter how fantastic their voices are. Yes, we love Naking Cole or someone who is just a beautiful voice, but the pantheon of great art.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He came around and he said, This is a very dangerous. He could see me. And I had started cooking and I'd started tidying, I'd done three different jobs. And the cooking thing, I'd done a plate with quail's eggs halved so elegantly around the edge of the plate. It was so beautiful. Everything's amazing. I said, I don't know why you've come, Billy. I have never been happier and more in charge of myself. He said, no, you're not well. You are really not well. I can see you. He said, your eyes are absolutely kind of off the scale. And I want you just to take this. And he gave me some, what was it called? It'll come to me and it sort of calms you down. It's an antipsychotic, essentially, I suppose, or an anxiolytic or something like that. That was one of the more extreme manic moments I'd had and actually was pretty frightening because it took me a long time to get down from it. And I am the last person in the world to say that they feel like Joan of Arc.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The power of it was so intense and I ran home. and I called my doctor, my psychiatrist, Billy. I said, Billy, I have to tell you I've had visions, and I feel the closest I can describe it to is like Joan of Arc. I feel irradiated by some extraordinary power and light. It's the most extraordinary thing, and I just don't know what I'm going to do. He said, I'm coming around.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A little mark for where that piece goes and he wrote what the name of the piece was. So the whole thing, and he started chroming all the Bright Worker, Mickey, all perfect and all the engine parts were out. And then he had a change of state. And it moved away from this optimistic bright mania, and he just kicked the cloth and all the pieces and everything just piled into a heap of junk and the car couldn't be rescued. And there's a sort of metaphor for something there. I don't know what it is, but she said that that's the problem. But when I've had mania, I had a manic episode right in the middle of someone's memorial. It was quite extraordinary. And it frightened me because...”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With mania, you want to concentrate, you want new projects, you've got amazing ideas in your head, you're risk-taking and entrepreneurial and grandiose. And I interviewed someone in America, I interviewed the wife, the husband sadly did take his own life. So I was talking about life with him. And she said, it's a terrible thing to say, she said, but I was always happier when he was depressed than when he was manic. When he's depressed, he's just lying curled up in a ball. Obviously, I didn't realize he was going to take his life to go that far. But when someone's manic, they are just out of control. They are so embarrassing they would do such weird things. She said, she said, you'll laugh, but it was awful at the time. He had a car, a nice car. It was like one of the original mustangs or something, and he took it apart piece by piece on a large piece of cloth in his garage, as an American would say, and each piece, you know, the pencil remarker he did.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In that way, and then look, it's amazing how I found people who've had mental health histories that have not been happy often have a more extreme difference in their left and right eye. Then if you look at my left and right eye, one is rather cold and calculating and one is warmer and friendlier. That's usual with people, I think. I don't know any empirical science behind it, but I did notice that almost everybody I interviewed had an extreme version of that, and I don't know what that means or whether it's anyone's ever done any research onto it. But there are signs and signals that come. It's like some people get, I get itchy under the chin when I'm going to have an asthma attack, for example, unmistakably itchy under the chin. With mania, which is often worse. I mean, I interviewed someone who.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the narratives that is often the one, what is the point? And it's also just It's like, I mean, all of us who had it, and I'm sure many of the people listening will have different metaphors and comparisons. It is like something being sucked out of your sort of energy sector and that you feel drained and you're convinced your face has gone white. And sometimes you look in the mirror and it has gone white. There has been a physical response to it. Utterly white. And people who love you and know you well see it in your eyes straight away. So my husband will say, whoa, what's the matter? I'll go I don't know, I don't know. I'm just going to go and lie down. I just don't know. And he would have seen it instantly. And I look at them myself in the mirror and think, what is he seeing? It is a common thing, and I noticed this during the documentary. If you take a magazine and cover half your face and look at your right eye and then cover the other half and look at your left eye, or even take a photograph.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The weather is real. You can't ever say, so I'm going out. It's not really snowing. It's not a blizzard outside. I'm going to wear a t-shirt. You have to accept that the weather is real. But you also have to accept that you didn't cause it. I didn't make it snow. And nor do you have to sort of welter in the problem of thinking, well, that's it. It's snowing now. It's going to snow for the rest of my life. It's always going to be cold. It will actually pass. Again, nothing to do with you. You can't make it pass. And those are the storms in your head. The mistake is not to think it's real. I'm just imagining it. No, it's really raining in your head. It is. Oh, what did I do to make it do this? You didn't make it rain. It's not your fault. And oh, it'll never go now. It will. The sum will come out. You don't know when it's not under your control. Those are three things. They're not absolutely hooray, but they're just enough if you cling on to them.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, can you look at this and tell me if it's normal or all right? And they go, Oh, let's find it. And you feel, okay. So if that's true of some little physical part of yourself, it's also true of the mental part of yourself that although you have family and friends who are supposed to be there for you, it's actually very difficult, even though you know it's the right thing to do to share with them what you're thinking. It's very hard. And they'd be upset. Nearly always when you have a crisis, if it gets as far as suicide, obviously even more so. But anyway, they say, why didn't you come and tell me they're actually angry with you? You know I'm there for you. Why didn't you come? Well, because I was a general water in my mind, as it were, and you just feel, and you have to try and overcome that. But yes, I have to be wary it won't necessarily go away. The other thing I often say is it's like the weather.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the coming storm and you do everything you can to avoid it and tell friends now. I mean, it's so much easier said than done. I have a theory, I call it my genital wart theory, is we all say how important friends are. Gosh, we need friends, friends are the people you can say anything to, aren't they? But actually they're not. If you had a genital wart, you wouldn't show it to your best friend. You'd say, oh, Tom, here, have a look at my blonde beef. They were goats. Shut up. Simony, you wouldn't show it to your mother, you know, or to your sister. And that's family, but you show it to a stranger, a doctor.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, Fred, that's right. Yeah. No, no, I think, I mean, it is in that sense what doctors call chronic like asthma. You can have an inhaler on you and usually be sort of safe and you know what you're allergic to, what triggers an asthma attack. But you never stop being an asthmatic. And the day could come when you least expect it. Of course, it's always the day you've forgotten your inhaler, where suddenly you just get this enormous attack and you can barely breathe. And it might have been 10 years since you last had such one. I'm sure anyone listening who has lived with asthma will know what I mean. And it's a bit like that. At your peril, do you think you've conquered it? You are living with it and coping with it and managing it. And most of the time one manages it, but sometimes you hear it, the hoof beats back in your brain.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“End up Glass and I just don't want to. I think what I think of is like if at school you're captain of the chess club and you put the team up on the notice board and you pin it up on the notice board and you then go away. You don't do is put the notice up and then hide behind a pillar and listen to how people respond to it. Oh, I see the what's he put that up for? He's a wanker, isn't he? And all that, you know, I mean, just put your notice up and walk away. Yeah.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There will be a rise in the kinds of anti kind of racist and transphobic and indeed anti-feminist on the other side and all kinds of other nastiness will prevail and Musk will go, yeah, that's what we call free speech. I'm a free speech absolutist, he called himself.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's probable that that endpoint is better arrived at if we live in a society where you're free to speak and share ideas and think freely and you're not told what to say. So in that sense, free speech is very much one of the key things on the way to it. But for some people, key speech has become the end point. I want to live in a society where I can say anything. It doesn't matter if people are starving and the gap between rich and poor is wider than it's ever been. The only thing that matters is I can say what I want. Well, that's I just don't think that's what John Stuart Mill and all the original figures who wrote on liberty and free speech. I don't think that's quite what they meant and I don't think it's what I see as the be-all and end-all. But so I'm worried that...”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I thought this was the home of free speech. Isn't it? I thought this was the fucking home of cunting free speech, but it isn't Oh, so free speech is negotiable. There are bits that you can't say and bits that you can. You know, because that's the point. I mean, free speech is, of course, important, but it's not the... Not the end point. The end point is human beings living together in peace and harmony and happiness as much as possible without war and violence and”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things for charities or work, but rather than engaging people. I'm not sure I want to see some of the tweets that float up from the kind of people that Musk encourages. I mean, I may be wrong. And it's not that I want it to be a left-wing thing, not a right-wing thing. I mean, I'm fully, of course, aware that it should reflect society as much as possible. Do you know what I wanted to do in sort of ways go on one of those? Doesn't Piers Morgan do something? Is it GB News he does or one of those things? Yeah. And I sort of wanted to go on. Now, you'll have to hold your ears now. Hello, how are you, you old cunt? It's fucking great to see you, cunty, cunty cunt cunt. And he would go, sorry, you can't say that.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can satisfy a few publicity requirements with one stroke of the pen, as it were, just by tweeting about them, and it will reach a bigger audience than if I spend four hours doing a profile with a journalist who always want to get under my skin and ask annoying questions. So it's a lazy good publicity tool. I'm slightly worried that I don't know that I may have to leave it if Elon Musk takes over. I'm not sure that I want to be involved in his Twitter. It doesn't sound like a nice, happy place. I mean, I'll consider, I might just simply stop using it in any other way except to post.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, indeed it isn't. I mean, it is supportive too. I mean, I've learned how to use it in a way that is not likely ever to upset me anymore. There was a time when I was fully engaged with it. And, you know, you call it accessible. And I've used similar images in the early days. It was like a lovely swimming hole in a glade, in a lovely wood somewhere where people of goodwill and from around would swim about and you'd bump into them and go, hi, how are you? And you'd just chat. And then suddenly you notice, oh, there's a turd floating on us. What the hell's that doing there? And then suddenly there'd be a bit of broken glass when you put your foot down or an old rusty pram or something and you realize that it had become, as you say, a kind of cispool. And that was a terrible shame. It's immensely useful to have that many followers because it means...”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“good fortune I am where I am, I don't need to say yes to everything that I'm asked to do, I don't owe it to the you know to myself to have to work all the time and so I am sometimes capable of saying looking to myself in the mirror and saying Quite happy today, aren't you, Stephen? And then I'll go No, don't say that it's the worst thing you could say.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“that will look just do whatever it wants to do I can say no I'm going to make you a bit sleeker and if I can do that with my body maybe I can do things with my mind maybe I am you know captain of my soul master of my destiny and all of that so yes I started walking every morning you know when I was in London around Regents Park and listen to audiobooks just choose all kinds of books that either I hadn't read for years or I'd always meant to read, you know, whether it was Dostoevsky or Agatha Christie. It wasn't about high literature necessarily. It was about just having a story in my head and walking and walking and looking and saying, wow, it's seven miles this morning. That's amazing. You feel you're doing something. So it's really been a slow process of allowing myself, I suppose, to be who I am and not to fight for my place at the table. I suppose I've accepted that through immense...”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“what it is a chronic condition i.e. a bit like asthma or diabetes something that's with you and that may not go away and may come back again and isn't necessarily under your control, you then do discover that there are therapies in life like exercise gardening, making music knitting. I mean, it doesn't almost matter what it is. It is, like, as I say, a folk wisdom of taking yourself out of yourself and also believing in a future. It's incredibly important. The first thing I did, I think, that was a breakthrough for me was that I lost some weight. I mean, I'm always fighting weight, but I was really pretty big back then. And I managed to lose about four stone. Now, it's not that losing four stone is in itself a vast achievement, but it tells me that I can control some part of myself, my physical body, is not a road.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, firstly, I went on a sort of exploratory journey of medication. Psychiatrist tried me on a number of things, sodium valparate, which has since become somewhat of a disgraced pharmaceutical, particularly when it's been given to people with various forms of epilepsy. And then lithium. And I was on lithium for quite a number of years. And then slowly I became aware of some of the kind of folk wisdom that has been around in our species for a very long time, but which was initially very irritating. I'll give you an example. Certain kinds of people who, if they hear someone's depressed, say, well, go walk it off, you know, just go for a nice walk. And you think, hang on, this is an illness. Just saying go and walk it off. And yet, once you've confronted it and once you've tried to control it, once you've understood it.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Successfully, but they have their own problems to say the least, and people can then slide down, leave their families. Children are hurting themselves. And if you ask them why they do it, it's always the same answer. It's to displace the other pain inside them. It's because the pain in there is worse. So you do that to take away from it. And that for a child is just heartbreaking to imagine.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Scientists that even the illness like manic depression and how serious it can be is part of us and gives us a secret power, gives us something extra. It's dangerous because it is highly, the word doctors use is morbidity. In other words, people, especially if it's undiagnosed, if you start finding that you're crashing in moods and becoming miserable and everyone's finding you're a pain in the ass, or you're absolutely wild and full of crazy plans and, you know, buying things, going on shopping sprees or being sexually exhibitionist or inappropriate. And people find that even more annoying. And if you don't know that it's actually an illness, then you just mask it with alcohol and narcotics of one kind or another. And they mask it pretty...”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I wanted to find out more about it, and that's where I went back to school and discovered that the psychiatrist when I was a boy had written bipolar question mark. And I discovered that so many people lived with this problem. And I also discovered something quite extraordinary because I asked everyone I spoke to, I did a little button with my finger. I said, I'm drawing a button on this table with my finger. If you press this button, you will never get a depressed episode again, one of those awful, terrible depressed episodes. But nor will you get a manic episode, one of those heightened, elevated, jubilant episodes. Do you want to press the button? And almost none of them wanted to press the button. And it reminded me of a thing that W.H. Orden, the poet, had written about Don't Take my devils away, or my angels will fly away too. And I don't know whether that's a true thing, but it's a fear that we have in the world.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This darkness that controud a mind so completely, but also that is part of an illness that I hadn't really understood I'd heard the phrase manic depression and I'd never really heard the word manic. Manic depression is too illnesses, depression which is a dark depressed, lowered, as in depressed state, and mania is an elevated state of energy and full of balance and vigour and a desire to communicate with people. And depression is the exact opposite. You just want to line, pull the duv ⁇ over your head and never speak to anybody. There are two poles and hence it's also known by polar. There's the one pole of mania, hypermenia and the other pole of a depressed state.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why my mind was taking me into such impossible dark places or, you know, when I had so much to be thankful for, I mean, what the hell, you know, I had enough money, I was well regarded in my profession. Why should I come to such a crisis just because someone didn't like my performance in that play is not really good enough. And I'm not that hypersensitive. That started what I suppose we have to call my journey into my mental health. And a few years later, I can't remember when, well, quite a few years later, probably about eight or nine, if not ten years later, I made a program at the BBC, two episodes, I think it was, called The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive, in which I tried to explore this peculiarity of...”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Course I never saw any of that. I did see a photograph someone sent me years later of police on the roof of my house in Norfolk, which was slightly disturbing, looking for signs of me and obviously feeling the worst. Ah, it was a strange event, but in some ways it was a cleansing or a necessary step, I suppose, because as a result of it I went to see psychiatrists and started to try and work out why.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said you've spent your life getting me out of terrible and embarrassing holes, and this is probably the worst of them. And he said, no, it's fine. It's all okay. And he was just wonderful.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT