Driving a motorcycle is like flying. All your senses are alive. When I ride through Beverly Hills in the early morning, and all the sprinklers have turned off, the scents that wash over me are just heavenly. Being House is like flying, too. You’re free of the gravity of what people think.
Hugh Laurie
As a real person, he wouldn’t last a minute, would he? But drama is about imperfection. And we’ve moved away from the aspirational hero. We got tired of it, it was dull. If I was House’s friend, I would hate it. How he so resolutely refuses to be happy or take the kind-hearted road. But we don’t always like morally good people, do we?
Hugh Laurie
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
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
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
I think there is a basic comfort in clever people who know things.
Hugh Laurie
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
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.
Hugh Laurie
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
I am a coffee fanatic. Once you go to proper coffee, you can’t go back. You cannot go back.
Hugh Laurie
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
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
I think pain is a very – it’s an extremely hard thing to empathize moment to moment. And you often don’t remember your own pain, you know, that moment that you broke a limb or you burned yourself or, I think, this is a common thing that women talk about with childbirth, that the memory of the pain is hard to summon up and relive, thankfully.
Hugh Laurie
I grew up with an impatience with the anti-scientific. So I’m a bit miffed with our current love affair with all things Eastern. If I sneeze on the set, 40 people hand me echinacea. But I’d no sooner take that than eat a pencil. Maybe that’s why I took up boxing. It’s my response to men in white pajamas feeling each other’s chi.
Hugh 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.
Hugh Laurie
People will survive, and they will find happiness. Happiness only comes when you’re not looking for it.
Hugh Laurie
One of the principal goals in my life has been to avoid embarrassing my children by doing the job I do. I hope I’ve managed to do that, and I hope that, with the job I’m in now, they are, if not proud, at least unembarrassed by it. I must say, my three are most agreeable children, who do nothing but delight me.
Hugh Laurie
Screenwriting is the most prized of all the cinematic arts. Actually, it isn’t, but it should be.
Hugh Laurie
Music is one of the noblest callings I can think of. It’s the highest of all the art forms to me. For example, if my kid said to me, ‘I want to give it all up,’ whatever it is that they’re doing, ‘and I want to take my saxophone and go out,’ I would say, ‘May God go with you. This is a great and noble thing that you’re doing.’
Hugh Laurie
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.
Hugh Laurie
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.
Hugh Laurie
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
I never was someone who was at ease with happiness.
Hugh Laurie
To be able to pretend to be something that I’m frankly not is very liberating and exciting.
Hugh Laurie
I run six-to-eight miles a day, plus weights and aerobics in the lunch hour. I also lie a lot, which keeps me thin.
Hugh Laurie
Unhappiness is an unfinished state; happy people don’t need our help.
Hugh Laurie
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
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
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
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.
Hugh Laurie
I hate menus, I hate choosing food. I just want to be brought. Bring me dinner!
Hugh Laurie
I do actually like Los Angeles. Partly because I was told I wouldn’t.
Hugh Laurie
I think actors are attracted to the idea of other identities and concealing themselves behind some other identity.
Hugh Laurie
I think of House as a deeply moral character, though some would no doubt argue with me. He does not judge. Beyond his normal tetchiness, there were no more than a half-dozen moments of actual condemnation from him. He understood lies and also why you lied, and there was an absolution there that is very, very appealing.
Hugh Laurie
I feel like I’m working on an oil rig right now. I’m away from home a lot.
Hugh Laurie
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
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
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.
Hugh Laurie
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.
Hugh Laurie
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
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
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.
Hugh Laurie
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
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
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
Believe it or not, perhaps I don’t show it much, or well, but I think I like people.
Hugh Laurie
You hope that your teenage self would like and forgive your 50-year-old self.
Hugh Laurie
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
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
Pain is an event. It happens to you, and you deal with it in whatever way you can.
Hugh Laurie
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
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.
Hugh Laurie