Benedict Cumberbatch Quotes

I can feel infinitely alive curled up on the sofa reading a book.

Because reading is one of the joys of life, and once you begin, you can't stop, and you've got so many stories to look forward to.

The further you get away from yourself, the more challenging it is. Not to be in your comfort zone is great fun.

CUSTOMER: I’d like to buy this audiobook. BOOKSELLER: Great. CUSTOMER: Only, I don’t really like this narrator. BOOKSELLER: Oh. CUSTOMER: Do you have a selection of narrators to choose from? Ideally, I’d like Benedict Cumberbatch

Metaphorically speaking, it’s easy to bump into one another on the journey from A to B and not even notice. People should take time to notice, enjoy and help each other.

I keep myself amused and others confused

I've seen and swam and climbed and lived and driven and filmed. Should it all end tomorrow, I can definitely say there would be no regrets. I am very lucky, and I know it. I really have lived 5,000 times over.

I am very flattered. I have also become a verb as in "I have cumberbatched the UK audience" apparently. Who knows, by the end of the year I might become a swear word too! It's crazy and fun and very flattering.

Pull the hair on my head the wrong way, and I would be on my knees begging for mercy. I have very sensitive follicles.

We all want to escape our circumstances, don't we? Especially if you are an actor.

Looking for happiness is a sure way to sadness, I think. You have to take each moment as it comes.

Maybe it's because I was an only child, but I've always wanted kids.

My mum and dad had worked incredibly hard to afford me an education.

I drive a motorbike, so there is the whiff of the grim reaper round every corner, especially in London.

One of the fears of having too much work is not having time to observe. And once you get recognised, there is nowhere for you to look any more. You can't sit on a night bus and watch it all happen.

I've always wanted to play a spy, because it is the ultimate acting exercise. You are never what you seem.

I had the privilege of being able to choose, or at least have the opportunity to work at, being anything but an actor.

I want to do it all. I want to climb mountains, go through jungles, fight wars in space, get the girl, shoot the bad-guy full of lead, have all the zippy one liners, bulge muscles out of a singlet, drip sweat and blood on screen, all of that.

[on Martin Freeman playing Bilbo Baggins] It was great. I got to hang out with him, and I kept a straight face for a bit and then I started giggling because I know Martin, I don't know Bilbo. For Martin to be sitting there playing Bilbo is amazing. He's going to be amazing, he's going to be fantastic in this film.

I have actual acting scars.

I'm a Prince of Wales Trust ambassador, so I'm all about giving youth an education, a voice and a chance to not take the wrong road.

Live Life Less Ordinary

Benedict Cumberbatch is like Alan Rickman Benjamin Buttoning.

I've realised now that the reality of children is you have to be in the right place with the right person.

I love doing impersonations of people.

The first time we did cavalry charge I was so breathless with excitement I nearly fell off the horse. I actually saw stars in front of my eyes and thought I was going to faint. The second time I had a bit more control but was still giddy with excitement. And the third time I was an emotional wreck. I had to really try hard not to cry.

Lines are very difficult to learn.

I've been quite a late developer on the clothes front, but I've suddenly realised it is one of life's joys.

What a tragic waste of engagement (selfies). Enjoy the moment. Do something more worthwhile with your time, anything. Stare out the window and think about life.

I've been very lucky at what's happened in my career to date, but playing something as far from me as possible is an ambition of mine - anything from a mutated baddy in a comic book action thriller, to a detective. If anything, I'd like Gary Oldman's career: he's the perfect example of it. I've love to have a really broad sweep of characters - to be able to do something edgy, surprising and unfashionable.

You can't imagine fame. You can only ever see it from an outsider and comment on it with the rueful wisdom of a non participant. When it happens to you, it doesn't matter what age or how, it is a very steep learning curve. The imprtanot thing to realize in all of it is that life is short, to protect the ones you love, and not expose yourself to too much abuse or narcissistic reflection gazing and move on. If fame affords me the type of ability to do the kind of work I'm being offered, who am I to complain about the downsides. It's all relative. And this are obviously very high class problems. The way privacy becomes an every shrinking island is inevitable but also manageable and it doesn't necessary have to get that way...

Why not consider it this way: they're the evil criminal organisation and you're Sherlock Holmes. I'll be John Watson. But we've got to be the Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman Sherlock and Watson because the BBC Sherlock is infinitely greater than all other adaptions." I stare at him. "It's the only adaptation that gets the bromance right.

Do I like being thought of as attractive? I don't know anyone on Earth who doesn't, but I do find it funny.

The more charming person is the person who admits the other person is more charming.

What a tragic waste o engagement (selfies). Enjoy the moment. Do something more worthwhile with your time, anything. Stare out the window and think about life.

Our daily lives are so mundane, we get taken over by what is immediately in front of us and we don't see beyond that.

Live a life less ordinary.

Life’s very precious. You’ve got to give it 120 per cent. Just celebrate the fact that we’re alive and enjoy it.

People are being beheaded in countries right now because of their beliefs or sexual orientation. It’s terrifying. It’s medieval. I’d take up arms against someone who was telling me I had to believe in what they believed or they’d kill me.

She could have just told him about the magic phone. Full disclosure. Then they could have solved it together. They could have Sherlocked and Watsoned from both ends of the timeline

Being in control is not the same as being free; and being out of control isn’t always scary. Or maybe it is scary, but good-scary.

There are moments when you can get completely and utterly blocked (by fear). When you start a rehearsal process or say yes to a job, you’re jumping in the air. By the time you’ve landed, you go, 'I’ve got to do this. I’ve actually got to make this work.

Taking your own life. Interesting expression. Taking it from who? Once it's over, it's not you who'll miss it. Your own death is something that happens to everybody else. Your life is not your own. Keep your hands off it.

The boy reported - after the Sergeant had slept for a few hours, which was not nearly enough - that YouTube had actually gone down for ten minutes under the weight of traffic. The story was truly global, truly immense: not Obama, not Justin Bieber, not Psy and not Bin Laden had ever touched this, he said. Not Khaled Saeed and not Mohamed Bouazizi, either. If Pippa Middleton and Megan Fox had announced their intention to marry during a live theatrical production of 50 Shades of Grey starring Benedict Cumberbatch, and then taken off their clothes to reveal their bodies tattooed with the text of the eighth Harry Potter novel, they might have approached this level of frenzy. But probably not, the boy said, because not everyone liked Benedict Cumberbatch.

I think with any characterization there's a point where you empathize, no matter how much of a deviance his or her actions may be from your understanding of humanity.

I can’t think of a wittier or even accurate comparison (Sherlock Holmes' hair), but I just think it makes me look a bit like a woman.

Does it matter what it is that moves us, so long as we are moved?

Whitey was one of those barbers who thinks you pay for the gab.

Oh, look at you lot. You're all so vacant. Is it nice not being me? It must be so relaxing.

Or we can settle in and watch every single episode of Sherlock.”     “Now you’re talking.” Benedict Cumberbatch is my homeboy.

There's a lot of Sherlock love in here. In many ways, this book might as well be called 'Deduce THIS, Sexlock Holmes!' with a picture of me licking his meerschaum, cross-eyed and screaming.

When it happens, pure leisure should feel like play, not work. You won’t be worrying about whether everyone else is having a good time; you won’t be lumped with the labor—physical, mental, or emotional—of planning, delegating, and cleaning up; you won’t be doing it out of obligation, because you know it’s good for you. Pure leisure requires a deliberate choice to carve out nonpurposive time just for yourself. For women, Schulte explains, that’s “nothing less than a courageous—subversive, almost—act of resistance.” But shouldn’t that feel good?

Britain’s Royal Society of Chemistry when, as part of the 2013 Cambridge Science Festival, it calculated how much it would cost to assemble all the elements necessary to build the actor Benedict Cumberbatch. (Cumberbatch was the guest director of the festival that year and was, conveniently, a typically sized human.)

Desire becomes overlaid with shame, and as a result, girls start to conceal their “vital, curious, pleasure-loving soul.” We dissociate ourselves from her, erase her from our histories, because it’s easier to make our way in the world that way. On some level, Gilligan says, we’re aware of what we’re sacrificing by dissociating from our desires, but this “awareness of complicity is so shameful that it often seems easier to justify it than to experience and question what has been sacrificed.

She could have just told him about the magic phone. Full disclosure. Then they could have solved it together. They could have Sherlocked and Watsoned from both endsof the timeline.

But his habits and appearance required strangers to alter their conception of an aristocrat to one who can afford to be himself.

When you’re a girl who really loves a thing, it’s never just about you and your thing. Everyone else makes it their problem. You can’t love the thing unseen, not even in your bedroom, alone. You either point-blank love the wrong thing (Take That), or you love the right thing (Blur) but in the wrong way (screaming at concerts) or for the wrong reasons (ogling).

Some things that seem obvious still need to be proven over and over again. Female birds sing. Women play. We are capable of having fun. And when we do, it's because we want to--the same as anyone else.

My best friend, Beth, tells me her best friend Brené Brown says you should keep a list in your purse of the people whose opinions matter to you. It’s a handy reminder: you needn’t worry about anybody else. My purse, which Nathan bought me, is patterned with a collage of Benedict Cumberbatch faces, so I don’t need such a list. Cashiers who say “I love your purse!” are the only people worth listening to.

If Pippa Middleton and Megan Fox had announced their intention to marry during a live theatrical production of Fifty Shades of Grey starring Benedict Cumberbatch, and then taken off their clothes to reveal their bodies tattooed with the text of the eighth Harry Potter novel, they might just have approached this level of frenzy. But probably not, the boy said, because not everyone liked Benedict Cumberbatch.

It is a little ironic that two of the lightest things in nature, oxygen and hydrogen, when combined form one of the heaviest, but that’s nature for you. Oxygen and hydrogen are also two of the cheaper elements within you. All your oxygen will set you back just $14 and your hydrogen a little over $26 (assuming you are about the size of Benedict Cumberbatch). Your nitrogen (2.6 percent of you) is a better value still at just forty cents for a body’s worth. But after that it gets pretty expensive.

You could call together all the brainiest people who are alive now or have ever lived and endow them with the complete sum of human knowledge and you could not between them make a single living cell, never mind replicant Benedict Cumberbatch. That unquestionably is the most astounding thing about us, that we are just a collection of inert components, the same stuff you would find in a pile of dirt... The only thing special about the elements that make you is that they make you. That is the miracle of life.

The fathers couldn't see themselves as parents, and I, the Mother, couldn't see myself as anything else. The parenting, the mothering, went all the way to the edges of me, and even slightly beyond the edges too, like coloring-in that didn't stay between the lines.

When you eat pizza, you eat pizza as a mother. Every day--hundreds of times a day, every day--you give up what you want and how you want it in so many tiny little ways, that whatever squeezed-out orange-half remains of you, that's who you are now. It's fine, really.

Now the photos serve as a reminder she says, to her, but mostly to her clients. “You should allow yourself more than a nail appointment. You should indulge in things that refresh your spirit, or make you laugh, or make you feel something.” She sighs. “People deserve indulgences.

For women, there has never been a history or a culture of leisure or play, and after childhood, women tend to lose play entirely. There’s just this huge sense of loss. When you don’t make that time a priority there are huge consequences, emotionally, spiritually, and physically.

Fathers are able to see themselves as other things because, typically, their professional identity is less affected by having children, and also because they simply have the uninterrupted time and the space to do so--thanks to mothers doing more than their share of unpaid care and domestic work.

At first it was not quite dark. I could see little trees growing out of the face of the cliff, and I grabbed at them with my hands as I went down. Several times I managed to catch hold of a branch, but it always broke off at once because I was so heavy and because I was falling so fast, and once I caught a thick branch with both hands and the tree leaned forward and I heard the snapping of the roots one by one until it came away from the cliff and I went on falling. Then it became darker because the sun and the day were in the fields far away at the top of the cliff, and as I fell I kept my eyes open and watched the darkness turn from grey-black to black, from black to jet black and from jet black to pure liquid blackness which I could touch with my hands but which I could not see. But I went on falling, and it was so black that there was nothing anywhere and it was not any use doing anything or caring or thinking because of the blackness and because of the falling.

Don’t you think it’s a bit weird that when you’re dreaming, you can scare yourself? Really, how can you not know that someone’s going to leap out from behind the bushes, when it’s you who put them there? Conscious, unconscious, Freud, something something? I gues it’s the same thing with desires. They similarly exist inside you but can still take you by surprise.

And it was then I began to realize for the first time that there are two distinct sides to a writer of fiction. First, there is the side he displays to the public, that of an ordinary person like anyone else, a person who does ordinary things and speaks an ordinary language. Second, there is the secret side which comes out in him only after he has closed the door of his workroom and is completely alone. It is then that he slips into another world altogether, a world where his imagination takes over and he finds himself actually living in the places he is writing about at that moment. I myself, if you want to know, fall into a kind of trance and everything around me disappears. I see only the point of my pencil moving over the paper, and quite often two hours go by as though they were a couple of seconds.

should probably mention that I know—now—what kind of person communicates via hidden notes in a library book. It’s the same kind of person who dances in the dark: a person who doesn’t want to be seen. A person Just Like Me. But that’s the thing about dancing in the dark. It’s good that no one can see you, but you can’t see each other either. You can’t see what good company you’re in. All these people, hiding. Just Like You.

I never knew Kierkegaard was funny, but I think this is funny: “The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss—an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.—is sure to be noticed.” I did not notice. I would catch my reflection in the mirror in the bathroom, where I went again and again to wash my hands after changing diapers. So used to gazing down at babies, I was shocked, every time, to discover there was another face up there. Our eyes would meet, and then I would finish drying my red, cracked hands and leave her behind, as if she were nothing at all. I guess it’s not that funny.

Tell me, do you know what it is that you love? Not who—I already know you love the most important people in your life—but what. And if you didn’t have to explain or defend it, would that change anything for you? I’m not implying you’re harboring an unspoken passion for something deeply embarrassing, although if you are, then you’re in the right place. But have you made yourself available to love the full suite of things that might move you? Or has the soft animal of your body been cut off at the pass, diverted toward things that seem more important? If, like the nurse in Elizabeth Caplice’s blog post, I told you it was okay, that not everything needs to be about making meaning, that not everything has to be justifiable as a good use of your time or mind, could you then let the soft animal of your body find its way toward loving what it loves? And what would that look like for you? It’s not that easy.

Beating oneself up for what really gets you excited, it’s a masculine approach to women’s experiences,” Emma says. “We have been acculturated to do it to ourselves.

Your mind has the power to shape your own reality

I don’t want to generalize, but the fact that men, in the cultures I know best, are encouraged to quash the emotional dimension of their lives is something that makes me say, sure, male academics love their stuff, but I’m not sure they’re even aware of it. They think of the love they have for their discipline as a balanced and nuanced appreciation of the virtuous or the valuable.

That it’s “just a show” is exactly the problem, I howled. How can a TV show have taken on such outsized significance in my life? Because there’s nothing else to compete with it, that’s why! What had my life become? I wailed. There was nothing that was my own. All I had was Benedict Cumberbatch!

I also know she claims it makes her horny because she’s a nerd who thinks Benedict Cumberbatch is hot. At least I know I won’t get horny. I’m more of a Hiddlestoner.

The bottom line is this: Nathan saw that my thing with Benedict Cumberbatch was weirdly important to me; it offered me something that I obviously needed, and most importantly, it had nothing to do with him. He gave me something much better than his permission: an exemption from having to care what he thinks. He’s that guy, the one man in the world who is more attractive to me than Benedict Cumberbatch.

In an essay that appears in a book called On Being 40(ish), the writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner says the essential conundrum of middle age comes down to this: “How can you be this dissatisfied when you have this much? How can you be this satisfied when you have so little?” Brodesser-Akner writes that it’s okay not to have any answers, but in my mind, I turn these questions over again and again.

Of all things, why was that the trade I made? I had no time and space to progress anything of any substance in my life, and now, all of a sudden, I’ve made eight hours available to listen to Benedict Cumberbatch doing the voice of Rumpole of the Bailey on audiobook? Of course it felt wrong; it felt like being a bad mother. That is what it feels like to want more.

In an excellent essay for Catapult magazine about fanfiction (which is really an excellent essay about love), the writer Emilia Copeland Titus notes, “Indifference is easy, but love—the kind of love that runs so deep and so clear that it threatens to burst the dam of your heart—is difficult.” It’s true. “There will always be people who expect you to explain that love,” she continues, “and that is perhaps the biggest challenge of all, even for those whose careers are dedicated to explaining and describing ideas.” But eventually, holding back that dam-bursting love gets tiring. And then, there’s only one thing for it: “Let the floodgates open.

It’s more like...think of that Sherlock series with that one guy, Benjamin Cummerbund, and—” “Benedict Cumberbatch,” she corrected through her laughter. “Right, that guy.

In her book The Birth of Pleasure, Gilligan writes that before the teenage years, young girls can move easily, their voices free from "second thoughts and instant revision." Then in adolescence, "girls often discover or fear that if they give voice to vital parts of themselves, their pleasure and their knowledge, they will endanger connection with others and also the world at large.

Desire becomes overlaid with shame, and as a result, girls start to conceal their "vital, curious, pleasure-loving soul." We dissociate ourselves from her, erase her from our histories, because it's easier to make our way in the world that way.

There are no such things as "girl toys" and "boy toys," but when a girl plays, it's somehow different. A boy does what he does because he has a passion, he follows his heart. It's a worthy pursuit, with inherent, universal, and lasting value, so we'd better support and protect it. When a girl does what she does, it's merely the by-product of outside forces. She's being manipulated into have inauthentic, disposable feelings for something with dubious appeal. Boys can enjoy play for a lifetime; girls are expected to mature out of it. It passes, just like their fads.

There is no age limit on liking things," she says, "and there's no age limit on human connection--for men, or for women, or for anyone." Yep, it's pretty straightforward.

I knew I should police myself to keep my burgeoning addiction in check, the way we have all learned to do with our sad little tricks for controlling our mobile phone usage, but I didn't know where to begin. I couldn't even really understand what this addiction actually was. I certainly hadn't heard of it happening to anyone else. "Thirsty, but only for water taken from one particular well," in the words of Balzac, a man who understood thirst long before Urban Dictionary did. "Cathexis," according to Freud: the concentration of mental or emotional energy on a particular person, idea or object, to a possibly unhealthy degree.

She said, matter of factly, that giving birth is so painful you feel you've been torn in two. "They should put mirrors in the labor ward," she advised, as if putting it in a suggesting box. "So you can see you've not been broken into pieces." I wondered later if my mother was recalling the pain of labor or actually everything that comes after, because later I understood that is exactly what motherhood is. The "shattering" is what the writer Sarah Manguso calls it in her Harper's essay about writing and mothering: the "disintegration of the self, after which the original form is quite gone.

scared. Like the doorman where she lived still not admitting to anyone else he was gay. Like the aunt who was conducting a secret pen friend affair with a lifer in prison. Mum used to say Alex had been born with the face of someone who’d signed a confidentiality agreement. Secrets were often seen as dark and deceptive, but sometimes they were simply sad truths that people tried to hide. Perhaps that had been the problem with her third book – readers had worked out that, secretly, her heart wasn’t in it. Her husband’s cheating was one factor that had pushed her to become an author, to forge an independent, successful existence. During the first year or two that followed, the series of her young lovers, a binge of light-hearted romance, had translated into two huge best-sellers, leaving readers clamouring for more of her heart-breaking heroes and arousing paragraphs. Trouble was, that binge eventually left Alex so sated that by the time she came to write the third novel, simply the word ‘romance’ turned her stomach. ‘Mum had been Dad’s life for so long, the two of them were each other’s school sweetheart, so the coffee shop became his life instead,’ Tom continued. ‘My mates loved this place. We’d pile in after school for Coke floats and they’d pester their parents to visit at the weekend. Slowly, by word of mouth, its fried breakfasts gained a reputation. Benedict Cumberbatch came in once when he studied drama at the university. We even served the

That line was that you should attempt to speak, write and even think aloud in a manner which no reasonable person could reasonably misinterpret. If somebody did unreasonably misinterpret your words then it reflected badly on them. Anyone claiming that Benedict Cumberbatch was clearly a virulent racist who had just exposed himself could expect to be laughed off the scene and dismissed without further thought. But in recent years – overlapping, not coincidentally, with the years of social media – this rule has changed. Today a politician, writer or other public figure is in the same position that all members of the general public are in. We can no longer trust that our listeners are honest or are searching towards similar goals. An outburst of insincere claims from members of the public may be made as eagerly as sincere ones. And so the collective ambition of public figures must become to ensure that they write, speak and think out loud in such a fashion that no dishonest critic could dishonestly misrepresent them. It should go without saying that this is an impossible, and deranging, aspiration. It cannot be done. It cannot even be attempted without going mad.

Beth taught me this lesson too, years ago, when she developed another important list (she loves lists), this one being her “list of interests.” She came up with this concept after she got tired of people asking her if she was going to renovate her house. She worked out the best way to shut down these conversations was simply to say: “Renovation is not on my list of interests.” It wasn’t figurative. She actually created a list of interests so “home renovation” could, specifically, not be on it.

We “don’t expect female texts to have universal things to say,” Loofbourow writes, so we dismiss them outright, without any real consideration. We only glance at them, and we think that’s enough to get all the info we need: they’re just girl stories.

If I had months to live, I would use that time to love Benedict Cumberbatch. Not all that time, of course, but as much of it as I wanted. I would even keep looking at pictures of him on the internet. Ridiculous, hey? It is not a good use of my time or mind, and it does not matter, and yet, there you have it. How could I ever justify this—wasting my precious time on something so unimportant? I can’t, not according to the criteria we use for deciding such things, anyway. That yardstick only measures stuff like productivity, objectivity, legitimacy, appropriateness. It doesn’t take into consideration, at all, how my love for something as silly as Benedict Cumberbatch makes me feel, and what that’s worth to me. It’s someone else’s value system, one that sees loving something, and especially loving something too much, as a bad thing, a problem, an embarrassment. It’s a system that doesn’t know how to account for all the ways in which other people might make meaning. On this measure, my love for Benedict Cumberbatch is never going to cut it, no matter how hard I try. And I’m tired of trying. If I had months to live, I would want to use that time to do what I love. After all, what could be more worthy of my time and attention than that?

I give what I can of my love, time, and support to my family and friends, but reserve the right to have a private, inner life.

Because when you ask, “What does your husband think about all this?” what you really want to know is: “Have you performed all the necessary psychic labor to make sure your feelings are, you know, okay to share?” Have you done the work?

By buying into the question of what the husbands think, I’m doing something that comes so naturally to me, it feels essential: I am holding myself to account. Something makes me happy, or brings me pleasure, and I ask, how does this make me look? Nice? Thin? Modest? Domestic? Caring? Invested in my relationship? Sexually faithful? Like a good wife? I put everything through a pressure test, to see if it will hold up under public scrutiny, to see if it’s okay. And if the pleasure doesn’t consider the needs of other people, and if it doesn’t attend to what other people require of me—if it’s just for me—then it will fail. No wonder so many women prefer to confine their pleasures to the privacy of their inner life, or to their supportive online communities. It’s the only way to escape the question of what your husband thinks about all this.

Joy is not made to be a crumb.

my nam jef

Women mature out of their pleasures. Men, on the other hand, get to hang on to theirs, turning them into lifelong passions, or even better, a career.