Posts tagged "Stephen Fry"
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[x] (via fuckyeahstephenfry)Almost everything I am, I owe to libraries. When I was a child there were no great libraries around.
Libraries still for me have this extraordinary charge. When I get in one, I feel this buzz, it is almost sexual. Behind these bound copies are voices - people murmuring to you, seducing you, dragging you into their world. I suppose if I have one campaign I can really get behind it is saving libraries. Everyone surely has the right to access the voices of the past.
- Stephen Fry: But I do think it is one of the advances in children' s literature, that... that you've made with this remarkable series, is... that you have not held back -- from the difficult and the frightening, and the treacherous and the unjust, and all the things that most exercise children's minds.
- JK Rowling: Well I feel very strongly that there is a move to sanitize literature. Because we're trying to protect children, not from... necessarily... from the grisly facts of life, but from their own imaginations. I remember being in America a few years ago, and Halloween was approaching. And three television programs in a row were talking about how to explain to children, it wasn't real. Now there's a reason why we create these stories -- and we have always created these stories. And a reason why we have had these pagan festivals. And a reason why even the church allows a certain amount of fear. We need to feel fear. And we need to confront this in a controlled environment. That's a very important part of growing up, I think. And the child that is being protected from dementors in fiction, I would argue, is much more likely to fall prey to them, later in life, in reality. And also, what are we saying to children who do have scary and disturbing thoughts? We're saying, that's wrong. And that... that's not natural . And it's not something that's intrinsic to the human condition. That they're, in some way, odd or ill.
- SF: Exactly.
- JKR: And it's a very dangerous thing to tell a child!
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There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphrys than to write poems, love-letters, novels and stories it seems. They whip out their Sharpies and take away and add apostrophes from public signs, shake their heads at prepositions which end sentences and mutter at split infinitives and misspellings, but do they bubble and froth and slobber and cream with joy at language? Do they ever let the tripping of the tips of their tongues against the tops of their teeth transport them to giddy euphoric bliss? Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it? Do they use language to seduce, charm, excite, please, affirm and tickle those they talk to? Do they? I doubt it. They’re too farting busy sneering at a greengrocer’s less than perfect use of the apostrophe. Well sod them to Hades. They think they’re guardians of language. They’re no more guardians of language than the Kennel Club is the guardian of dogkind.The New Adventures of Stephen Fry (via fuckyeahstephenfry)
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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.The Liar (via fuckyeahstephenfry)h
(via fuckyeahstephenfry-blog)
- Stephen Fry: Six year olds, I mean, probably cry 70 or 80 times a day.
- Phill Jupitus: 70 or 80 times? ...What does Uncle Stephen do?
- Stephen Fry: ... I try to teach them Latin.
- Alan Davies: 'Not the British Museum again!'
- Phill Jupitus: 'I don't like foie gras!'
- Alan Davies: 'This is Prosecco and this is real champagne.' [mimics crying]
A collective of miscellany and mirth. Also sometimes I draw stuff.