Top 100 Hugh Laurie Quotes
#1. To be a head boy, you have to be very clever, you have to be a scholar, and I was never a scholar in any shape or form.
Hugh Laurie
#2. I feel like I'm working on an oil rig right now. I'm away from home a lot.
Hugh Laurie
#3. To tell you the truth, the older I get, the less I know. I keep meeting people, both older and younger, who seem to have accrued so much more knowledge or expertise or certainty about who they are and the jobs they do. I just marvel at it.
Hugh Laurie
#4. You hope that your teenage self would like and forgive your 50-year-old self.
Hugh Laurie
#5. Screw you in the ass with an anglepoise lamp,
Hugh Laurie
#6. I've never been clever with money. I will buy anything at the top of the market.
Hugh Laurie
#7. 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.
Hugh Laurie
#8. He picked up the fountain pen and clicked the top on and off a few times while he listened.
Hugh Laurie
#9. I started to think of friends I could lean on for some help, but, as always happened when I attempted this kind of social audit, I realised that far too many of them were abroad, dead, married to people who disapproved of me, or weren't really my friends, now that I came to think of it.
Hugh Laurie
#10. They're very harsh people, the British: hard to impress, very tough on each other, but I rather like that. It's not that the British are more honest - you're just under no illusion with them.
Hugh Laurie
#11. a girl in a lemon-coloured shirt sat at a desk, with word processor, potted plant, mug of pencils, furry gonk, and wadges of orange paper.
Hugh Laurie
#12. I don't think of myself as funny. I think of myself as rather grave, actually. And I'm suspicious of fun. I never quite know what that is or how to deal with it or how to generate it. That's my fault. I know it's a burden on the people I'm with. It's tiresome.
Hugh Laurie
#13. I have always stuck up for Western medicine. You can chew all the celery you want, but without antibiotics, three quarters of us would not be here.
Hugh Laurie
#14. I hate menus, I hate choosing food. I just want to be brought. Bring me dinner!
Hugh Laurie
#15. I rowed for Cambridge. I was pretty good at that.
Hugh Laurie
#16. I think my father gave me a great reverence for medical science. He was about as opposite to the personality of House as one could imagine. He was polite and easygoing, and would have gone to great lengths to make his patients feel attended to and heard and sympathized with.
Hugh Laurie
#17. I get anxious about a lot of things, that's the trouble. I get anxious about everything. I just can't stop thinking about things all the time. And here's the really destructive part - it's always retrospective. I waste time thinking of what I should have said or done.
Hugh Laurie
#18. God and the Doctor we alike adore But only when in danger, not before John Owen
Hugh Laurie
#19. Humility was a cult in my family. I only got it out of my father by accident when he was very old that he had won an Olympic gold medal.
Hugh Laurie
#20. Seems to me that this business, for actors anyway, is not so much about whether or not you do good work. It's about whether or not you get the chance to do good work.
Hugh Laurie
#21. I have a reverence for medicine because I hero-worshiped my father [a former doctor], and because I admire doctors, I admire study, empiricism and rational thought. I don't study, empiricize or think rationally myself - but I admire it in others.
Hugh Laurie
#22. I would cling to unhappiness because it was a known, familiar state. When I was happier, it was because I knew I was on my way back to misery. I've never been convinced that happiness is the object of the game. I'm wary of happiness.
Hugh Laurie
#23. L.A. runs on optimism, enthusiasm and flattery. I think you can go a little bit crazy. I've heard people say there's a limit to the number of years you can stay in this city without going slightly mad. It's just too damn sunny in every dimension - weather-wise, socially and professionally.
Hugh Laurie
#24. It doesn't rain at all in California. Once a month, a man drives through spraying Evian.
Hugh Laurie
#25. 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.
Hugh Laurie
#26. Screenwriting is the most prized of all the cinematic arts. Actually, it isn't, but it should be.
Hugh Laurie
#27. I never thought I'd end up living in Los Angeles while my children grew up in Britain, but here I am, and we are all making the best of it.
Hugh Laurie
#28. 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.
Hugh Laurie
#29. The meter said six pounds, so I passed a ten pound note through the window and watched a fifteen-second production of 'I'm Not Sure I've Got Change For That', starring licensed cab driver 99102, before getting out and heading back down the street.
Hugh Laurie
#30. Of course, they hadn't really been happier at all. But they 'd been days, and they'd had Sarah in them, and that was near enough.
Hugh Laurie
#31. 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.
Hugh Laurie
#32. Humility was considered a great virtue in my family household. No show of complacency or self-satisfaction was ever tolerated. Patting yourself on the back was definitely not encouraged, and pleasure or pride would be punishable by death.
Hugh Laurie
#33. Look,' I said, 'I'll be honest with you. You're a big chap, and I'm sure you can do more press-ups than I can. And I admire you for it. This world needs people to be able to do press-ups. It's important.
Hugh Laurie
#34. Acting is largely about putting on masks, and music is about removing them.
Hugh Laurie
#35. It was the sheer variety of the pain that stopped me from crying out. It came from so many places, spoke so many languages, wore so many dazzling varieties of ethnic costume, that for a full fifteen seconds I could only hang my jaw in amazement.
Hugh Laurie
#36. He clambered out of the car, eager to show how quickly he could clamber out of cars, and followed at my shoulder as I strode over to the house.
Hugh Laurie
#37. Winning a rowing race is not like winning anything else. Here's my theory: you're facing backwards, so you're looking at the people you're beating
and there's something exquisite about that.
Hugh Laurie
#38. I didn't realize House would be the central character, more the bitter comic relief appearing occasionally. I relish his wounded nature - the lameness, the scarred Byronic hero.
Hugh Laurie
#39. His name was Rayner. First name unknown. By me, at any rate, and therefore, presumably, by you too.
Hugh Laurie
#40. I'm reasonably easygoing. Messing up my lines or making a fool of myself is where you find my fears. Like a lot of English people, I'm prey to embarrassment - the dread that everyone's sort of sniggering at you, that you're going to look like an idiot. I think that sort of halts us all.
Hugh Laurie
#41. 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.
Hugh Laurie
#42. Even the greatest poets, I think, cannot quite get to the places that music can get to in the human - I was gonna say mind, but it's actually the entire body. It somehow seems to infuse the entire body.
Hugh Laurie
#43. Now, my mom always said two wrongs don't make a right. But she never said anything about four wrongs, and that always left me confused.
Hugh Laurie
#44. 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.
Hugh Laurie
#45. They, all of them, work incredibly hard to make me seem clever and heroic, neither of which I am.
Hugh Laurie
#46. Not surprisingly, they frisked me like they were taking a frisking exam. To get into the Royal College of Frisking. Five times, head to toe, mouth, ears, crotch, soles of shoes. They tore most of my clothes from my body, and left me looking like an opened Christmas present.
Hugh Laurie
#47. Unhappiness is an unfinished state; happy people don't need our help.
Hugh Laurie
#48. The great trap for non-American actors trying to play Americans, I think, is to start thinking of American-ness as a characteristic. It isn't. It is no more a character trait than height. It is just a physical fact, and that's all there is to it.
Hugh Laurie
#49. This was the tricky bit. The really tricky bit, trickiness cubed.
Hugh Laurie
#50. When the ship goes down, the waves very quickly roll over the top of it, and attention shifts elsewhere. It's just the natural order of things in TV - in life - and is as it should be.
Hugh Laurie
#51. Thus freedom now so seldom wakes, The only throb she gives, Is when some heart indignant breaks, To show that still she lives. THOMAS MOORE
Hugh Laurie
#52. I really do believe the camera steals the soul. But that may be because I'm worried about my soul. I don't have much of a soul to begin with; I can't afford to lose much.
Hugh Laurie
#53. I don't like the act of talking; it makes me slightly light-headed.
Hugh Laurie
#54. 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
Hugh Laurie
#55. 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.
Hugh Laurie
#56. I don't really understand why everybody doesn't want to direct. It's an absolutely fascinating combination of skills required and puzzles set on every possible level, emotional and practical and technical. It calls upon such a wide variety of skills. I find it completely absorbing.
Hugh Laurie
#57. Just because it's a bad job doesn't mean I need to do it badly.
Hugh Laurie
#58. The temperature must have been in the nineties, and there seemed to be far, far too much air in the room. It was bunched and crowded, and in your face and eyes, and it made you think the room was a rush-hour tube train, and a lot of extra air had managed to sneak in just as the doors were closing.
Hugh Laurie
#59. Happiness is the twinkle in your grandmother's eye as you reverse the tractor off her legs.
Hugh Laurie
#60. Imagine that you have to break someone's arm.
Hugh Laurie
#61. The financing of all TV shows is dictated by finding an audience between 18 and 49. I have now passed beyond 49, so probably, I am no longer a desirable commodity for TV. And I am at peace with that; that's fine.
Hugh Laurie
#62. It's not the way we do it on planet Earth, certainly.
Hugh Laurie
#63. I have my moments. Ever since I was a boy, I never was someone who was at ease with happiness. Too often I embrace introspection and self-doubt. I wish I could embrace the good things.
Hugh Laurie
#64. I had too many things to say, and too small a brain to sort them out with.
Hugh Laurie
#65. Every day is the opportunity for a better tomorrow.
Hugh Laurie
#66. I run six-to-eight miles a day, plus weights and aerobics in the lunch hour. I also lie a lot, which keeps me thin.
Hugh Laurie
#67. Believe it or not, perhaps I don't show it much, or well, but I think I like people.
Hugh Laurie
#68. I saw a man this morning Who did not wish to die Patrick Shaw-Stewart
Hugh Laurie
#69. Not before the harvest is in, and the mules
are rested
Hugh Laurie
#70. Well, that obviously wasn't good enough. Not by a long shot. Saying period at the end of something doesn't make it incontrovertible.
Hugh Laurie
#72. There weren't many good things to be said or felt about my situation. Not many at all. But the rule is that after any engagement, won or lost, you replay it in you mind to see how much you can learn. So that's what I did ...
Hugh Laurie
#73. It's good that you feel bad,' she said, after some thought. Not much thought, obviously, but some. 'If you felt nothing, it would mean there is no love, no passion. And we are nothing without passion.
Hugh Laurie
#74. 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.
Hugh Laurie
#75. 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.
Hugh Laurie
#76. Love is a word. A sound. Its association with a particular feeling is arbitrary, unmeasurable, and ultimately meaningless
Hugh Laurie
#77. It alarms me to think of all that I have read and how little of it has stayed with me.
Hugh Laurie
#78. Now, where did I leave my time-machine? Oh I know, next Wednesday.
Hugh Laurie
#79. Pain is an event. It happens to you, and you deal with it in whatever way you can.
Hugh Laurie
#80. We went through all the usual exchanges dictated by Hollywood and polite society. She tried to scream and bite the palm of my hand, and I told her to be quiet because I wasn't going to hurt her unless she shouted. She shouted and I hurt her. Pretty standard stuff, really.
Hugh Laurie
#81. Ideas are 10 a penny. It's the execution that's the hard thing to do. House is standing up against a tide of sentiment and emotionalism over reason that threatens to engulf this world. When you think about it, a rationalist, a man of science and reason, is in a pretty lonely position.
Hugh Laurie
#82. Having a vote once every four years is not the same thing as democracy.
Hugh Laurie
#83. Face-cream, hand-cream, nose-cream, eye-cream. I wondered for a moment how serious it would be if you ever got home drunk and accidentally put face-cream on your hands or hand-cream on your face.
Hugh Laurie
#84. One thing House needs Wilson for is vanity. He needs someone to laugh at his jokes.
Hugh Laurie
#85. This was all horribly wrong. This was red wine with fish. This was a man wearing a dinner jacket and brown shoes. This was as wrong as things get.
Hugh Laurie
#86. It is the middle of December now, and we are about to travel to Switzerland - where we plan to ski a little, relax a little, and shoot a Dutch politician a little.
Hugh Laurie
#87. Russian vodka is OK if you need to clean the oven. For drinking, it must henceforth be Polish.
Hugh Laurie
#88. I think classical music tuition is, well, was when I was a child, was an abomination. I think in some ways it is one of life's great tragedies for everybody who gives up an instrument.
Hugh Laurie
#89. 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.
Hugh Laurie
#90. I think you're a dangerous, corrupt, lying piece of nine-day-old mosquito shit.
Hugh Laurie
#91. 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.
Hugh Laurie
#92. The glory of American television is Dennis Franz.
Hugh Laurie
#93. To be able to pretend to be something that I'm frankly not is very liberating and exciting.
Hugh Laurie
#94. Piano was - well, all musical instruments were taught in this very rigid, formal, classical method when I was young.
Hugh Laurie
#95. 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.
Hugh Laurie
#96. Solomon raised an eyebrow. Or rather, he left it where it was and dropped his body slightly.
Hugh Laurie
#97. I have been instrumental in banning bottled water on the set. It hasn't gone that well with the crew ... so I replaced it with tequila.
Hugh Laurie
#98. I had to wonder how Ginny could hold her head up under the weight of cosmetics smeared all over her face. Underneath it all, she may have been quite pretty. Or she may have been Dirk Bogarde. I will never know.
Hugh Laurie
#99. It gets on top of me and I get frustrated.
Hugh Laurie
#100. People will survive, and they will find happiness. Happiness only comes when you're not looking for it.
Hugh Laurie
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