A rare polymath, 63-year-old Stephen Fry has written, among other works, satirical novels, a trio of unsparing memoirs, a charming how-to-write-poetry book and reimaginings of the Greek myths . In his native England, he has hosted quiz shows, documentaries and podcasts. He has acted in TV and film . Lately, he has settled into the role of avuncular public intellectual. “I’m terribly keen to find things out if I don’t know about them,” Fry says. “Then I need to show what I know.
What we have to understand is that once we have our set of rules and outlooks, any suggestion that those may be wrong becomes a suggestion that I may be wrong. It’s an assault on my Self with a capital S. That’s partly what Freud meant by the narcissism of small differences: that arguments become deeply personal.I do. I loved him. He was adorable company, but I was also quite scared of him. He was a much tougher figure than I. He didn’t mind being disliked.
That was the first thing that hit me like a hammer: when I read about the life of this extraordinary man and saw what it came to and then realised that the crime he committed was one that I was likely to commit – that we had a similar nature. Discovering his whole world: I went from Wilde to the French writers Huysmans and Rachilde, then through to American writers: Gore Vidal’s, and William Burroughs and the extraordinary sexual adventures going on there.
There’s so much. I mean, look at the acts of a sociopath, which are performed with absolute will in the sense that he means to do what he’s doing, but he’s doing it because he has desires and impulses which he didn’t choose to have. Nobody elects to be a sociopath. The difference between us and them is one of degree. That certainly interests me.
GoodWeekendMag Exactly. Every single action every Individual takes is made due to systems raised and lived within