"If your life, or the life of someone you love, is hanging in the balance, of course you would withstand any amount of abuse to get the job done and to get the life saved. Of course, you have to be convinced that person knows what they're doing. In real life, you have no way of knowing that you're dealing with the best person for the job. It's only on television that you can know that."
Hugh Laurie on his thoughts about his TV character
Dr. Gregory House (HOUSE M.D.)
"To me, he's a hero, ... He's not polite. He's not someone you want to take home to meet your mother, necessarily. This is a guy in search of truth. Incidentally, that truth one day could save your life or the life of someone you love. That's a heroic thing."
"I am terribly conscious of the fact that the world doesn't need any more actors. There are so many brilliant actors around that one more twit like me joining the back of the queue seems completely unnecessary."
"When asked if living in America would make him any less pessimistic or miserable: Oh, I hope nothing would ever do that. I won't let go of my roots."
"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
"Guilt I can do. If [I have] any expertise at all, it's in the area of guilt. I have a black belt in guilt. If you ever want a guilt-off, the next time we meet let's see how we match up. I'm pretty confident in that area."
"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. The people I admire are those blokes in Fair Isle sweaters with pencils behind their ears who knew how to design mechanical things better than anybody else in the world."
"Mr. and Mrs. Little have won tonight!"
"I find it preposterous. I can see in some ways I am playing a sexy character. The idea of a damaged genius is an interesting, intriguing character, but it has nothing to do with me . . . I think whoever is playing this role would be in the position I am now."
Hugh Laurie on his TV character Dr.Gregory House - House MD
"I never was someone who was at ease with happiness."
"He was in a coxless pair with a man called Jack Wilson. I've got a fantastic picture on my desk of the two of them getting their medals on a pontoon at Henley. I imagine they were playing the national anthem and my dad is very rigid, 'this is the way to behave', and Jack Wilson is loose and groovy and looks like he should be mixing a martini. I sometimes wished my father could take that pleasure in himself."
Hugh Laurie on recalling his father winning a gold medal in rowing at the 1948 Olympics in London.
"How did I do that? It's a long story. You know, kids, boys, explosive things. It will happen."
"He was a very gentle soul and, I think, a very good doctor. And I'm probably being paid more to become a fake version of my own father."
"Really? I suppose reading the confidential psychiatric file of his ex-girlfriend."
"People assume that I'm very highly trained, that I studied and did years and years of Shakespeare. I have no training whatsoever and I've only done one Shakespeare play at university. If people want to believe that, I'm happy to go along with it."
"Perfection is intensely annoying. Audiences were ready for a character who didn't obey the usual pieties of modern life."
"So he came back at 40 ... with a science degree, thinking, `Well, what am I going to do now?' and with two kids, he enrolled in medical school with a lot of 19-year-olds, ... an amazing thing."
"He worked as a doctor for 30 years and as far as I know, never stood up in front of millions of people and got a gold shiny thing for it, which seems ridiculous someone who pretends to do that should be honored and recognized, but it's a crazy world, you know?"
"They, all of them, work incredibly hard to make me seem clever and heroic, neither of which I am."
"This may be my deficiency, but I don't think of him as great bastard at all."
"Everyone else can just lump it."
"I feel like I'm working on an oil rig right now. I'm away from home a lot."
"It's not his physical gait that is transforming, ... It's the having one hand. It's being one-handed. I find that much more constricting than walking with a limp. Actually walking with a limp is not that troubling. But to be one-handed, to drink a cup of tea and put two sugars in, and open a door and answer a telephone -- it all becomes incredibly time-consuming. Every scene, for me, is about, where am I going to park the cane? When I pick up this, where am I going to put the cane? That's a physical constraint. But, you know, you adapt incredibly quickly. Human beings do. We're very quick."
"To drink a cup of tea and put two sugars in and open a door and answer a telephone becomes incredibly time-consuming. Every scene for me is about, where am I going to park the cane? When I pick this up, where am I going to put the cane? That's a physical constraint."
"There's the clown in House, there's an adolescent in him, a child, a playful side. There's also a tormented self-destroyer as well. I get the best of all possible worlds."
"There's just sort of this assumption that whatever ...... the writers come up with,"
"I just feel like that's a young person's game. It's partly because you spend your whole time mocking authority figures, and once you reach the age where you could be a general or a bishop or a politician, it means something different. It stops being the kid in class doing impressions of the teacher."
"We're getting a lot of air miles, ... I'll go back when I can, and they'll come here when they can. But it's tough."
"Plainly, if your life is hanging in the balance, the most important thing to you at that moment is going to see the best person for the job,"
"I'm rather enjoying the whole process of reinvention, ... To be able to pretend to be something that I'm frankly not is very liberating and exciting."
"I'm just going to draw out three at random, and everyone else can just lump it."
