Hugh Laurie Quotes

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.

I feel like I’m working on an oil rig right now. I’m away from home a lot.

Pain is an event. It happens to you, and you deal with it in whatever way you can.

I hate menus, I hate choosing food. I just want to be brought. Bring me dinner!

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.

People will survive, and they will find happiness. Happiness only comes when you’re not looking for it.

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.

I feel like a hostage to fortune. Not that I am complaining. I wanted to play the role. But in truth I didn’t think the show would be such a success. OK, I thought it would fail. Not because it was bad. I was confident it was good, but plenty of good things just sort of wither on the vine.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

To be able to pretend to be something that I’m frankly not is very liberating and exciting.

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.

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.

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.

I am a coffee fanatic. Once you go to proper coffee, you can’t go back. You cannot go back.

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.

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.

Unhappiness is an unfinished state; happy people don’t need our help.

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.

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.

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.

The glory of American television is Dennis Franz.

It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to make a blues record.

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.’

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.

I was too shy, I think, to sing publicly. It takes a particular kind of person. And when I was young, I was not that person. In the first instance, when a record company said to me, do you want to try and make your record, my first reaction was, no, I’m not worthy – I couldn’t possibly, and so on and so forth.

Acting is largely about putting on masks, and music is about removing them.

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.

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.