Hugh Laurie Quotes - Page 3

I just read an 800-page history of the Scottish Enlightenment and, honestly, I may as well just start it again now, because I cannot remember a single thing. I can barely remember where Scotland is.

My dad gave me my first bike at 16. I soon fell off and was in a wheelchair for weeks. I haven't fallen since.

Boxing is fascinating. It's good for the soul to be made to feel clumsy. I swank around during the week thinking I'm a big cheese, but you don't feel like that when you're in the ring with a chap who knows what he's doing. It's ritual humiliation. I'm going to be slugged about and probably killed, but I love it and have to do something to keep fit.

Having a vote once every four years is not the same thing as democracy.

LA runs on optimism, enthusiasm and flattery. I think you can go a little bit crazy... It's just too damn sunny in every dimension - weatherwise, socially and professionally.

People are falling all over themselves to send you free shoes and free cufflinks and colonic irrigations for two. Nobody ever offers you a free acceptance speech. There just seems to be a gap in the market. I would love to be able to pull out a speech by Dolce & Gabbana.

I never went to drama school, I don't have any certificates saying: 'He's a qualified actor.' But I did think that House was something I didn't have to apologise for. It was something I was really proud of and it was sort of ... whether you liked it or not, it was undeniable.

People assume that I'm very highly trained, that I studied and did years and years of Shakespeare. I have no training whatsoever and I've only done one Shakespeare play at university. If people want to believe that, I'm happy to go along with it.

I think maybe even one of the reasons I became an actor was actually to hide. I mean, it sounds paradoxical because, of course, people are standing up in a public place and encouraging other people to look at them. So that's not the conventional definition of hiding.

I am very, very aware at all times. I'm watching myself, I'm listening to myself, I'm judging myself, critiquing myself all the time, and I will know when I do something and I will immediately say, "Can I do another one, because I didn't quite get that thing," or that I wanted to do something there and it didn't quite work.

I hate menus, I hate choosing food. I just want to be brought. Bring me dinner!

We put this 15-year old girl on the cover of a fashion magazine, and tell everyone she is the epitome of sexual perfection, but we jail anyone who touches her for another three years.

One thing House needs Wilson for is vanity. He needs someone to laugh at his jokes.

As a real person, he wouldn't last a minute, would he? But drama is about imperfection. And we've moved away from the aspirational hero. We got tired of it, it was dull. If I was House's friend, I would hate it. How he so resolutely refuses to be happy or take the kind-hearted road. But we don't always like morally good people, do we?

It's a holy city for music.

I do have a huge problem, a huge problem. In fact, worse than watching is hearing. I cannot stand to hear my own voice. When it's coming out of my mouth right now it sounds fantastically interesting to me. It's rich in light and shade, it goes up and down. But when I hear it either on TV or even on someone's answering machine, I just sound like I've had half my brain removed.

One of the principal goals in my life has been to avoid embarrassing my children by doing the job I do. I hope I've managed to do that, and I hope that, with the job I'm in now, they are, if not proud, at least unembarrassed by it. I must say, my three are most agreeable children, who do nothing but delight me.

I couldn't imagine what Fox thought they were doing, contemplating such a jagged protagonist for a prime-time drama. I only knew that I wanted the role very much.

Perseverance does not equal worthiness. Next time you want to get my attention, wear something fun. Low-riding jeans are hot.

In books, day breaks, and night falls. In life, night rises from the ground. The day hangs on for as long as it can, bright and eager, absolutely and positively the last guest to leave the party, while the ground darkens, oozing night around your ankles, swallowing for ever that dropped contact lens, making you miss that low catch in the gully on the last ball of the last over.

She turned towards me and narrowed her eyes...narrowed them horizontally, not vertically.

When school friends would think about appearing on stage as the most frightening, the most awful, intimidating experience ever, I knew that it was something I could do.

There's an undeniable pleasure in stepping into an open-top sports car driven by a beautiful woman. It feels like you're climbing into a metaphor.

Newton's Third Law of Conversation, if it existed, would hold that every statement implies an equal and opposite statement. To say that I'd turned the offer down raised the possibility that I might not have done.

I suppose actors crave attention of some kind or they have suffered some form of arrested development and are still living in a sort of child's fantasy existence at some level in their psyche.