Hugh Laurie Quotes

Quotes by and about Hugh Laurie

(Continued from his main entry on the site.)

Laurie: "I'm a soft-handed boy who's grown up to be a soft-handed man."

Laurie: "It's a terrible thing ... to wait until you're ready. ... No one is ever ready to do anything."

Laurie: "There's a temptation to paint characters a single color, but humans don't work that way. Hitler couldn't bear cruelty to animals. ... Those things are inherently contradictory. But that's how people are."

Laurie: "There are all kinds of hidden tides and currents at work in our brains that we're not aware of."

Laurie: "There are great things about Los Angeles. The trees are fantastic: some of the best trees you'll see anywhere. The architecture: miserable, looks like a petrol station."

Laurie: "I often think about my father who was a physician and how strange it is that I am better rewarded for faking this job than he ever was for doing the real thing. ... It doesn't seem right."

Laurie: "I didn't have the gift for science that perhaps I needed to be a [real-world] doctor, and I certainly did not have the appetite for hard work that I knew was needed."

The Independent: "[As a boy] he cheated in French tests, told lies chronically, smoked in the school loos and refused to work hard. When ordered to have piano lessons, he went on hunger strike for three days (and got his own way.)"

The Guardian: "He once compared talking to the press to putting his testicles on a chopping board – and, judging by his past interviews, it almost invariably turns into an exercise in caustic self-deprecation and soul-searching, which journalists tend to take as symptomatic of a deeper malaise."

The Guardian: "It is hard not to wonder if the loudly expressed ennui ... and the threats to start hyperventilating are really glimpses into the tortured self-doubting soul that broils beneath."

The Independent: "Friends and fellow actors constantly bring up his doubts and insecurities ('When I looked at him through the camera,' said Ben Elton about an early collaboration, 'the vulnerability was heartbreaking') and he himself can be relied on, in interviews, to strike a note of existential despair. 'Perhaps that's my problem - where is the struggle?' he agonized to the Guardian. 'There has been no struggle. Where's the passion of my life? Where is its purpose?'"

WebMD Magazine: "Make no mistake: Hugh Laurie and [Dr. Gregory House] ... are not one and the same, even if Laurie is supremely comfortable assuming his persona."

Lisa Claustro: "[It is not the case that] Laurie was cast in the role of Dr. House because creator David Shore and producer Paul Attanasio felt Laurie was greatly similar to the character. On the contrary, Laurie couldn't be more different."

Laurie: "I don't talk like House [and] I certainly don't think like him."

Laurie: "If I was House's friend, I would hate it. How he so resolutely refuses to be happy or take the kind-hearted road."

Katie Jacobs: "House has no censor, and Hugh has a censor to the Nth degree."

Laurie: "I certainly don't have [House's] psychopathic disregard for social niceties. ... If anything, I'm rather oppressed by social niceties and go to great lengths to fit in and say the right thing."

Wall Street Journal: "Stephen Fry attributes [Laurie's self-deprecating] attitude to his friend's chronic Presbyterianism. Laurie was raised ... by what Fry describes as 'parents who believed in the virtues of modesty to the point of self-abnegation. Cockiness, self-satisfaction and pride were the three deadly sins in the Laurie household."

Laurie: "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."

Web MD Magazine: "Like House, Laurie is cynical about alternative medicine. 'I am very skeptical, and that has got a lot to do with my reverence for my father and for his belief in the rational, logical, and empirical,' he says."

Laurie [on Stephen Fry:] "I just delight in the way his brain works."

Stephen Fry [on himself and Laurie:] "I can't help it, but whenever I smile it looks smug and I look complacent, so I'm the very opposite of Hugh. Hugh looks pissed off. People go to a party and they say, 'What's wrong with Hugh? What have I done to offend him? What's wrong?' 'No, no, that's just how he looks. He just looks hangdog and pissed off, but he's fine, don't worry.' Whereas people probably go to a party and think, 'What's Stephen looking so pleased about?' And in fact I'll be crying inside. I'll be miserable, but it looks smug."

Laurie: "Stephen is really better at putting himself about. Agreeing to put himself in the firing line. My reaction is always to say, 'No, don't do it, you're mad. People will tear you to bits, or they'll think such-and-such about you.' He is much more open. He thinks, 'Well, that's too bad, but I'll do it anyway.'"

Laurie: "George Clooney is everything you hope George Clooney will be, plus about 10 percent. ... He is so funny, and energetic, and clever, and kind, and all the things you hope he is going to be and more. ... He is ... incredibly positive and energetic and really, really hard-working - I mean, the man doesn't sit down."

Laurie: "[George Clooney is] a sort of unofficial monarch [of Hollywood], in a way, and he has a responsibility to behave - there's a certain noblesse oblige thing about him - he takes that responsibility seriously and wants to provide for the people around him."

Emma Thompson: "He was always so funny, the funniest person I've ever met."