Wit & Attitude Quote by Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry’s line lands because it’s a confession disguised as a joke, and a joke sharpened into a social position. “Children would drive me insane” isn’t really about hating kids; it’s Fry performing the familiar persona of the civilized, slightly overtaxed mind. The humor works by exaggeration, but the subtext is status: he’s aligning himself with the adult world of ideas, where irritation can be alchemized into scholarship.

The “probably” does quiet work here. It softens the arrogance of preference, letting him admit a hierarchy (university over primary school) without sounding cruel. That’s classic Fry: self-awareness as social lubricant. He’s not merely saying he likes Shakespeare; he’s signaling the kind of person he is - one who feels most alive inside language, texts, and the long conversation of culture.

Then he pivots from punchline to yearning: “deeply, deeply in love.” The repetition drops the comic mask for a second and shows how literature functions for him less as a subject than as a relationship. Shakespeare becomes shorthand for a whole sensibility: wit, verbal play, human messiness turned into art. Coming from a comedian, that’s not incidental. Fry’s career has been built on Englishness as performance - the elegance of phrasing, the pleasure of reference, the belief that language can be both weapon and refuge.

Context matters: Fry emerged as a public intellectual-celebrity hybrid, a figure whose authority is partly comedic and partly curricular. This quote flatters an audience that wants to believe that loving Shakespeare is still a viable identity - not dusty, not dutiful, but erotic, sustaining, and alive.