Stephen Fry

If you have time to develop an Orton sentence like that, you can't be in the throes of love.

And so it's a wonderful joke.

And I just knew it was funny, but also I'd never heard language used like it.

And I ran to my mother afterwards and said, Mummy, I hope you won't be offended if I say that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection.

And she said, what are you talking about?

Anyway, she explained that obviously what I'd been watching was the importance of being honest.

And we lived in the country.

And as Sidney Smith once said, miles from the nearest lemon.

But we did have a portable library that came every other Thursday in a Pantechnicon, a little grey van.

And it trundled along and there I was waiting for it.

And the driver got wheezingly out and went round and opened the door in the side.

lowered the steps and patted my bottom into the interior in the way that people did in those days without having to be arrested.

And there was the nice woman in the cardigan and the little demi-loon spectacles on a chain and powdery cheeks who said, hello, my dear.

And I said, have you got The Importance of Being Honest by Oscar Wilde?

helped me find it and stamped it out, that springy stamp that the library books used to be adorned with.

And I rushed home with it and read the four comedies, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, Lady Fandomare's Wind, and, of course, The Importance.

And I learnt The Importance more or less off by heart from then on.

Then I ran back and said, have you got anything more?

And she eventually found the complete works of Oscar Wilde.

I rushed home with those and started to read them and didn't understand them all.