Stephen Fry quotes from QI

Stephen Fry

What comes before a German Bight?

[presses buzzer] A German Bark.

Stephen Fry

Yeah, ho.

Stephen Fry

You were thinking of J.S., possibly.

Alan Davies

No, they never bark when they're going to attack you. It's when they go quiet, that's when you have to worry.

Stephen Fry

Germans?

Stephen Fry

Do you know how they communicate across valleys?

Alan Davies

Shout.

Mobile phone.

Stephen Fry

[grinning] No... Not... It's a language they use, but instead of their vocal cords, they...

Alan Davies

Fart?

Jeremy Clarkson

It was my favourite VC winner was a first World War fighter pilot. His name was Ferdinand West, I think. And they were attacked by 7 German planes. In the first, sort of, wave he had his leg shot off - completely off. So he, it was jamming the controls: he took it out and threw it out of the plane, manoeuvred his plane so they could get off some good bursts into the Germans, drove them away, dropped his bombs, landed back at base, apologised for the poor quality of his landing, and then sought medical attention.

Stephen Fry

My great-uncle had his tongue shot off in the war. He never talked about it.

Stephen Fry

Name, if you can, the subject of the three volume book whose first volume is entitled "The Long Years of Obscurity."

Phill Jupitus

The career of Phil Collins.

Ronni Ancona

Is this book about the word obscurity before it got famous? How it was beaten by its adjective father. And left on the doorstep abandoned by its mother, and it was the only noun growing up in a house of verbs. And the verbs were always going out doing lovely things, because they were doing words, and poor old obscurity was stuck inside suffering from asthma. And then after school it was surrounded by quotation marks and got beaten up terribly. And then one day entered into reality TV show and it became very famous and it was much in demand and used to describe all the people who leave Big Brother House?

They built the station next to the power station you see there, which is the third worst eyesore in the country. It was a Country Life thing—do you know what the first one was?

Phill Jupitus

[in a posh accent] People! Public people! Working classes! Poorly groomed servants! The ill-bred ponies! That Blair fellow!

Stephen Fry

If I find out you've been intercepting my mail …

Stephen Fry

Given the right conditions, it's a dangerous, a deadly merciless killer of humans. How?

Clive Anderson

[presses his buzzer]

Stephen Fry

Clive.

Clive Anderson

Lead piping in the billiard room.

Alan Davies

Pregnancy?

Clive Anderson

Pregnancy isn't a disease, Alan.

It would be if Alan got it!

Clive Anderson

It’d be a surprise, wouldn’t it?

Stephen Fry

I’ll give you a clue. It begins with D.

Alan Davies

Death?

Stephen Fry

Doctors don’t treat death.

Stephen Fry

Oh, there you are. Great Wall of China.

Jimmy Carr

I've got quite an interesting fact about that.

Stephen Fry

Yep.

Jimmy Carr

Longest wall in the world, not one cashpoint.

Phill Jupitus

I'd love to have been in parliament that day. "And I put it to the honourable member, that he who smelt it, dealt it!"

Stephen Fry

Whoa!

Phill Jupitus

Stephen doesn't have beer goggles, he has Madeira pince-nez. "Oh, you're a cracker! More Madeira? A small Sherry?"

Alan Davies

A Sherry Monocle? He's got the Sherry Monocle in.

Stephen Fry

You're all rotters and I hate you.

Alan Davies

Does it affect memory? Cos I’m fairly sure it does.

Stephen Fry

I did know that.

Alan Davies

Cos on my 30th birthday, I got some photos back after we had this dinner, and there were people with indoor sparklers. And I thought, “when did they have them? I must have gone to the loo or something. I don’t remember that.” And the next one was me with a sparkler. Then it’s me with two sparklers. Me lighting sparklers really intently, handing sparklers out.

It was just a little smidge as I thought, and I tried to get rid of it by internal squeezing. But it can't be done, and...

Stephen Fry

...are the muscles a little lax down there?

Stephen Fry

What's the difference between table tennis and ping pong?

Jo Brand

In table tennis you serve the ball with a bat, and in ping pong it's launched from the vagina of a Thai woman.

Stephen Fry

Do you know what "Mahatma" means?

Alan Davies

It means "Can I have my hat please, Mother?"

Stephen Fry

They don't have kneecaps, do they?

Aren't you confusing them with mer-babies?