Top 100 Hugh Laurie's Quotes
#1. I was a Fry & Laurie fan, I was a Blackadder fan, I was a House fan and he [ Hugh Laurie]s a pleasure.
David Mandel
#2. It's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to make a blues record.
Hugh Laurie
#3. People choose the paths that grant them the greatest rewards for the least amount of effort. That's the law of nature, and you defied it.
Hugh Laurie
#4. I know a lot of people think therapy is about sitting around staring at your own navel - but it's staring at your own navel with a goal. And the goal is to one day to see the world in a better way and treat your loved ones with more kindness and have more to give.
Hugh Laurie
#5. 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.
Hugh Laurie
#6. 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
#7. Outside my window, the British public traded crack, slept with itself for money, and fought drunken battles it couldn't remember in the morning.
Hugh Laurie
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. Necessity is the mother of self-delusion.
Hugh Laurie
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. His name was Rayner. First name unknown. By me, at any rate, and therefore, presumably, by you too.
Hugh Laurie
#14. My first job was playing 'Nurse 2' in a film by Ben Elton called 'Maybe Baby,' and the first actors I worked with professionally were Hugh Laurie and Joely Richardson. I was totally star-struck. I got that job on my final day of drama school, so it was a nice bridge into the professional world.
Shelley Conn
#15. I never was someone who was at ease with happiness.
Hugh Laurie
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. Riding my motorcycle around L.A. is like my own video game. But unlike many folks at the wheel, I am occupied with getting where I'm going and keeping myself safe. Most people are applying makeup, texting, and checking out the beauty in the next car.
Hugh Laurie
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. I'm finding it increasingly difficult to simply walk down the street. In New York, I dashed in to buy a big pair of sunglasses to conceal myself, but the guy behind the counter shouted 'Hey! It's Dr. House.'
Hugh Laurie
#22. Acting is largely about putting on masks, and music is about removing them.
Hugh Laurie
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Perseverance does not equal worthiness. Next time you want to get my attention, wear something fun. Low-riding jeans are hot.
Hugh Laurie
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. It's a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you're ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now. And you may as well do it now. Generally speaking, now is as good a time as any.
Hugh Laurie
#29. I love the acting community at Cambridge. It's really quite committed and serious, since the days of Derek Jacobi and Ian McKellen right through to Emma Thompson and Hugh Laurie.
Tom Hiddleston
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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.
Hugh Laurie
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Girls are complicated. The instruction manual that comes with girls is 800 pages, with chapters 14, 19, 26 and 32 missing, and it's badly translated, hard to figure out.
Hugh Laurie
#39. It's not the way we do it on planet Earth, certainly.
Hugh Laurie
#40. 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
#41. Imagine that you have to break someone's arm.
Hugh Laurie
#42. 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.
Hugh Laurie
#43. Hugh Laurie (playing Mr. Palmer) felt the line 'Don't palm all your abuses [of language upon me]' was possibly too rude. 'It's in the book,' I said. He didn't hit me.
Emma Thompson
#44. Happiness is the twinkle in your grandmother's eye as you reverse the tractor off her legs.
Hugh Laurie
#45. Just because it's a bad job doesn't mean I need to do it badly.
Hugh Laurie
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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.
Hugh Laurie
#49. Driving a motorcycle is like flying. All your senses are alive. Being House is like flying, too. He's free of the gravity of what people think.
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. 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
#52. 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
#53. I hate menus, I hate choosing food. I just want to be brought. Bring me dinner!
Hugh Laurie
#54. 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
#55. I dare say being a receptionist at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square gets you a reasonable salary and all the nylon stockings you can eat,
Hugh Laurie
#56. 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
#57. I didn't feel so bad about the myrrh, because I've never been quite certain what it is.
Hugh Laurie
#58. I was proud of 'House, MD,' and I think it was good for what it was and remarkably smart for a television show. I loved Hugh Laurie and was proud to be by his side that long and to be trusted by him.
Robert Sean Leonard
#59. When I was a small boy, 10, 11, 12, probably somewhere around there, when I first heard a blues song on the radio, it was a jolt of electricity. It grabbed me by the throat, it made me shiver. And I knew from that moment that this was for me and this would be with me for the rest of my life.
Hugh Laurie
#60. 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
#61. Hugh Laurie was intimidating, but he's the greatest guy. He's so wonderful and smart and funny and serious, and he sets the bar high. So if I was scared, it's because I wasn't measuring up.
Peter Jacobson
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. He picked up the fountain pen and clicked the top on and off a few times while he listened.
Hugh Laurie
#65. I personally believe that the iPod is a frankly corrosive device because it encourages you to surround yourself with your favorites. The whole idea of a playlist is to surround yourself with your favorite things, and the interesting thing is that when you do that, they cease to be your favorites.
Hugh Laurie
#66. I do actually like Los Angeles. Partly because I was told I wouldn't.
Hugh Laurie
#67. I've never been clever with money. I will buy anything at the top of the market.
Hugh Laurie
#68. Screw you in the ass with an anglepoise lamp,
Hugh Laurie
#69. I travel to work on my motorcycle, so it's jeans, boots and a brown Aero leather jacket that weighs as much as I do. If it were black, it would seem like I've got a Brando idea going on, which I don't.
Hugh Laurie
#70. You hope that your teenage self would like and forgive your 50-year-old self.
Hugh Laurie
#71. 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
#72. I love Hugh Laurie, but I don't want to be a guy who goes to work every day for nine months of the year in a corner of Burbank. I really don't. I like doing a bit here and a bit there and strange things, and I think that's held me back.
Peter Capaldi
#73. 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.
Hugh Laurie
#74. I feel like I'm working on an oil rig right now. I'm away from home a lot.
Hugh Laurie
#75. Don't go to Casablanca expecting it to be like the film. In fact, if you're not too busy, and your schedule allows it, don't go to Casablanca at all.
Hugh Laurie
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. Killing Dirk, killing anybody, was not going to change anything apart from Francisco's f***ing ego, which was already large enough to house the world's poor twice over, with a few million bourgeoisie in the spare-room.
Hugh Laurie
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. Screenwriting is the most prized of all the cinematic arts. Actually, it isn't, but it should be.
Hugh Laurie
#83. We exchanged wry military grins that told each other how much we hated those fly-blown pieces of shit who tied the hands of decent men and called it politics.
Hugh Laurie
#84. I am a coffee fanatic. Once you go to proper coffee, you can't go back. You cannot go back.
Hugh Laurie
#85. 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
#86. It doesn't rain at all in California. Once a month, a man drives through spraying Evian.
Hugh Laurie
#87. Americans have never really caught on to the idea of sheep. I think they think it's cissy.
Hugh Laurie
#88. 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
#89. That Hugh Laurie show is nothing but Scrubs fan fiction.
Zach Braff
#90. 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
#91. 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
#93. 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
#94. I said no thank you a dozen times, and fuck off once.
Hugh Laurie
#95. God and the Doctor we alike adore But only when in danger, not before John Owen
Hugh Laurie
#96. 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
#97. The strange thing - and this is one of the advantages of being incredibly shallow and superficial - is that wherever I am, that's sort of home.
Hugh Laurie
#98. 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
#99. Hugh Laurie once described how he eventually came to realise that there is not a finite amount of success in the world, and that someone else gaining great success did not necessarily mean that there was now less to go around for everyone else. It's a good thing to remember.
Rob Brydon
#100. I rowed for Cambridge. I was pretty good at that.
Hugh Laurie
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