Welcome to our collection of quotes by Hugh Laurie. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Hugh Laurie
James Hugh Calum Laurie (born 11 June 1959) is an English actor, author, comedian, director, musician, and singer. He is known for portraying the title character on the medical drama television series House (2004–2012), for which he received two Golden Globe Awards and nominations for numerous other accolades. He was listed in the 2011 Guinness World Records as the most watched leading man on television and was one of the highest-paid actors in a television drama, earning £250,000 ($409,000) per episode of House. His other television credits include arms dealer Richard Onslow Roper in the miniseries The Night Manager (2016), for which he won his third Golden Globe Award, and Senator Tom James in the HBO sitcom Veep (2012–2019), for which he received his 10th Emmy Award nomination.
Laurie first gained recognition for his work as one half of the comedy double act Fry and Laurie with his friend and comedy partner Stephen Fry, whom he met through their mutual friend Emma Thompson while attending Cambridge University, where Laurie was president of Footlights. The two men acted together in a number of projects during the 1980s and 1990s, including the sketch comedy series A Bit of Fry & Laurie and the P. G. Wodehouse adaptation Jeeves and Wooster. Laurie's other roles during this time include the period comedy series Blackadder (in which Fry also appeared) and the films Sense and Sensibility (1995), 101 Dalmatians (1996), The Borrowers (1997), and Stuart Little (1999). Outside of acting, Laurie released the blues albums Let Them Talk (2011) and Didn't It Rain (2013), both to favourable reviews, and authored the novel The Gun Seller (1996).
Among his honours, Laurie has won three Golden Globe Awards and two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and has been nominated for 10 Primetime Emmy Awards. He was appointed OBE in the 2007 New Year Honours and CBE in the 2018 New Year Honours, both for services to drama.
Ideas are 10 a penny. It's the execution that's the hard thing to do.
Piano was well, all musical instruments were taught in this very rigid, formal, classical method when I was young.
I rowed for Cambridge. I was pretty good at that.
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.
It gets on top of me and I get frustrated.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One thing House needs Wilson for is vanity. He needs someone to laugh at his jokes.
Russian vodka is OK if you need to clean the oven. For drinking, it must henceforth be Polish.
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.
Every day is the opportunity for a better tomorrow.
It alarms me to think of all that I have read and how little of it has stayed with me.
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.
It's a basic truth of the human condition that everybody lies. The only variable is about what.
Having a vote once every four years is not the same thing as democracy.
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.
Not before the harvest is in, and the mules
are rested.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Happiness is the twinkle in your grandmother's eye as you reverse the tractor off her legs.
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.
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.
This was the tricky bit. The really tricky bit, trickiness cubed.
Perseverance does not equal worthiness. Next time you want to get my attention, wear something fun. Low-riding jeans are hot.
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.
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.
Driving a motorcycle is like flying. All your senses are alive.
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.
It's a holy city for music.
I don't have a single complete show or movie or anything else that I could look at and say, Nailed that one. But endless dissatisfaction is, I suppose, what gets us out of bed in the morning.
The first big stars, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, you know, these were gigantic stars. I even wonder sometimes whether all music actually comes from women, whether the first glimmering of music is a mother soothing a baby.
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.
Muddy Waters, I suppose, was my first great hero. You know, every boy wants to be a guitar player, and Muddy Waters was just the king. He was the King Bee. He was it.
Lots of people would say House doesn't have any charm at all. I would disagree, though: I find him immensely charming and endlessly entertaining. He has a sort of grace and a wit about him, and ultimately, I think he is on the side of the angels.
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.
In film, because you know where the ending is, characters can change, but in television, you substitute revelation for change, and that can be hard to pull off.
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.
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.
It doesn't rain at all in California. Once a month, a man drives through spraying Evian.
Acting is largely about putting on masks, and music is about removing them.
I wouldn't be able to act like Al Pacino or play the piano like Dr. John, But I could probably act better than Dr. John and play the piano better than Al Pacino.
The glory of American television is Dennis Franz.
I've never been clever with money. I will buy anything at the top of the market.
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.
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.
I think actors are attracted to the idea of other identities and concealing themselves behind some other identity.
Piano was -- well, all musical instruments were taught in this very rigid, formal, classical method when I was young.
Unhappiness is an unfinished state; happy people don't need our help.
I don't like the act of talking; it makes me slightly light-headed.
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.
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.
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.
Pain is an event. It happens to you, and you deal with it in whatever way you can.
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.
One great benefit of not being on TV every week is that people will be a lot less interested in what I have in my supermarket basket. I could even un-tint my car windows -- or at least opt for a lighter shade.
I do actually like Los Angeles. Partly because I was told I wouldn't.
Believe it or not, perhaps I don't show it much, or well, but I think I like people.
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.
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.
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.
Some people are drawn naturally -- there are natural guitarists, and there are natural piano players, and I think guitar implies travel, a sort of footloose gypsy existence. You grab your bag and you go to the next town.
I hate menus, I hate choosing food. I just want to be brought. Bring me dinner!
People will survive, and they will find happiness. Happiness only comes when you're not looking for it.
Screenwriting is the most prized of all the cinematic arts. Actually, it isn't, but it should be.
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 admit I can't shake the idea that there is virtue in suffering, that there is a sort of psychic economy, whereby if you embrace success, happiness and comfort, these things have to be paid for.
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.
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.
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.'