James Hugh Calum Laurie, CBE (UK: /ˈlɒri/; born 11 June 1959) is an English actor, director, musician, comedian, and author.
Believe it or not, perhaps I don't show it much, or well, but I think I like people.
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.
It's a holy city for music.
I rowed for Cambridge. I was pretty good at that.
Piano was - well, all musical instruments were taught in this very rigid, formal, classical method when I was young.
I think that’s the lesson you learn in life. As you get older you realize you’re never going to grow up and you’re never going to be ready. And you may, as well, do things now, don’t wait
It's a basic truth of the human condition that everybody lies. The only variable is about what.
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.
[. . . ] and as I walked, I tried to see the funny side. It wasn't easy, and I'm still not sure that I managed it properly, but it's just something I like to do when things aren't going well. Because what does it mean, to say that things aren't going well? Compared to what? You can say: compared to how things were going a couple of hours ago, or a couple of years ago. But that's not the point. If two cars are speeding towards a brick wall with no brakes, and one car hits the wall moments before the other, you can't spend those moments saying that the second car is much better off than the first.
There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now.
I don't talk like House, or walk like him. I certainly don't think like him. I don't like to think for more than 15 minutes at a stretch actually; I am a fragile flower.
I'm not a religious man. . . I find I am a fan of science. I believe in science. A humility before the facts. I find that a moving and beautiful thing. And belief in the unknown I find less interesting. I find the known and the knowable interesting enough.
Celebrity is absolutely preposterous. Entertainment seems to be inflating. It used to be the punctuation to your life, a film or a novel or a play, a way of celebrating a good week or month. Now it feels as if it's all punctuation.
I would just hear piano players and I would hear music, and just think - I don't just want to sit here and passively listen; I want to get inside it.
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.
Success on a cosmic level completely eludes me. I'm deeply suspicious of things being too good. It's part of my superstition, I think, to generate pain in order to give the illusion of gain. I'm not saying I reject success, but honestly, I don't quite know how to deal with it. It's an old feeling: As soon as you have the thing you've been going after all your life, that reasonable degree of security, you start kicking against it, doubting it.
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.
I have resolved to pick one novel and just read it over and over again for the rest of my life, because I cannot remember anything anymore.
I don't believe in God, but I have this idea that if there were a God, or destiny of some kind looking down on us, that if he saw you taking anything for granted he'd take it away.
Clive Dunn, as I understand it, retired to the south of Spain, where he worked extensively in watercolours. I don't own any of Clive Dunn's watercolours. I loved him in 'Dad's Army,' loved him. But not enough to actually seek out his watercolour work.