Stephen Fry quotes from QI

Sean Lock

I hear voices.

Stephen Fry

Do you?

Sean Lock

But I ignore them and I just carry on killing.

Brian Cox

I can vouch for that. There are people who study this. My director of one of my documentaries, he got a PhD from Oxford studying frog communication.

Stephen Fry

He was a Professor of French.

Stephen Fry

He genuinely believed it was possible that after Christ's ascension into Heaven, the rings of Saturn are where he put his foreskin. Now, you're maybe thinking that I'm trying to mock the church, that this is nonsense. But Christ, of course, was a Jewish boy, and like all Jewish boys, at the eighth day of his birth, he was circumc –

Brian Cox

They're fifty thousand miles across!

Stephen Fry

She also actively sought out degrading experiences. She once drank a cupful of cancerous pus from a woman who'd abused her.

Alan Davies

But had she appeared on Mock the Week?

Brian Cox

I'm going to, to play the card there.

Stephen Fry

[looking at Cox] You are right! You're a true scientist. The fact is that nobody does really know, do they.

Alan Davies

[pointed cough]

Stephen Fry

[turns to see Alan with his card] Well done!

Alan Davies

[Formally] Thank you.

Sue Perkins

All you need is an analogy that’s pertinent to you, so in my case: All relationships. And then you realize: Perfect eighteen month, and then they're dead.

Stephen Fry

The second law of sexual dynamics.

Sue Perkins

Yeah, according to me, that's how I extrapolate.

Brian Cox

To make that statistically significant though, you'd have to have an awful lot of relationships.

Sue Perkins

Oh, I do.

Stephen Fry

Not on Earth, but in our solar system. I'm thinking of Neptune or Uranus.

[tittering]

Stephen Fry

[looking sternly into the camera] No. No. No. No.

Stephen Fry

"Welcome to Northamptonshire - Let yourself..."

Sue Perkins

"…down."

Stephen Fry

This is an optimistic one here. "Welcome to Tower Hamlets - Let's make it..."

Alan Davies

"…out alive."

Ross Noble

There was another slogan, it said: It did happen on Friday the 17th. If you've witnessed it...

Stephen Fry

I've just done voice for them, so that if you have TomTom or Garmin…

Ross Noble

No, you drive along, and it goes: "Turn left. Now, the interesting thing about this particular building…" [His voice is drowned under the audience's laughter and applause. Stephen buries his face in his hands.]

Alan Davies

Did you do it as if you were talking to me? That's the worrying thing. "Left, you moron!"

Ross Noble

I have the key to the city of Port Pirie, in Australia.

Stephen Fry

Do you?

Ross Noble

I was doing a gig, and I was talking to a bloke, turned out he was the mayor. So I went, ‘can I have the key to the city?’ and he went, ‘yeah, alright then.’ So I said, ‘alright then,’ I didn’t want him to back out, I said, ‘where’s your office?’ He says, ‘on the High Street.’ ‘I’ll be down there tomorrow.’ So I turned up, he’d got a shed key and a ribbon and went, ‘there you go.’

Ross Noble

I had a sat-nav, after Port Pirie, and the Nullarbor Plain in Australia, big long…

Stephen Fry

Between Adelaide and Perth.

Ross Noble

Yeah. The longest straight road in the world. And I turned it on and it said, “Drive forward for two days.” And the next bit went, “then turn left.” But the thing was… But the stupid thing was, it was such a long road, I missed the left hand turn!

Stephen Fry

Children were always beaten. Really, we are the first generation - Um, I'm not. I was beaten huge about when I was a child in prep school.

Clive Anderson

Really?

Stephen Fry

God, yes. From age seven 'til thirteen, at least twice a week. I was a bad boy, and I was always being thrashed.

Clive Anderson

What for?

Stephen Fry

Oh, stealing, lying, cheating, um, being cheeky, being a nuisance, evading games…

Clive Anderson

Bit of a smartarse, were you?

Stephen Fry

Yeah, being a smartarse...

Clive Anderson

...being too clever for your own good. That sort of thing. Always telling everyone what was going on.

Stephen Fry

All things that annoyed people about...

Clive Anderson

Well, they certainly beat that out of you, didn't they?

If you're in your seventies now, how old were you in the end of World War II? Maybe ten years old? How did you help win the war? When you were just ten years old, you did not help win the war.

Stephen Fry

By not eating bananas.

Yeah. You were nothing but a drain on British resources!

Stephen Fry

[to the laughing panelists] You've gotta admire his guts, haven't you?

Effectively every 70-year-old Brit, effectively fought on the side of Nazi Germany! And lost the war every little bit as much as we did!

Female sexual dysfunction, for example, started being pushed at the time that various companies were trying to get licences for things like Viagra for the 50% of the population who are unlucky enough not to have a penis. And...

Stephen Fry

[to Jo Brand] Steady.

Alan Davies

Jo's got loads of penises, but they're all in her drawer.