Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me.

'If they only knew!' I screamed inside. 'If they only knew what I have within me. How much I can pour out, how much I have to say, how much I have inside. If they only knew!'

I used many times to touch my own chest and feel, under its asthmatic quiver, the engine of the heart and lungs and blood and feel amazed at what I sensed was the enormity of the power I possessed. Not magical power, not all that Carrie teenage telekinetic wank, but real power. The power simply to go on, the power to endure, that is power enough, but I felt I had also the power to create, to add, to delight, to amaze, to transform. Yet I was unwanted, rejected and unthought of. My mother, yes, she believed in me, but everybody's mother believes in them. No one else believed in me.

Certainly the most destructive vice, if you like, that a person can have - more than pride, which is supposedly the number one of the cardinal sins - is self-pity. I think self-pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have, and the most destructive.

It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred - and I think actually hatred's a subset of self-pity, not the other way round - it destroys everything around it except itself. Self-pity will destroy relationships, it will destroy anything that's good, it will fulfill all the prophesies it makes and leave only itself.

And it's so simple to imagine that one is hard done by, and that things are unfair, and that one is under-appreciated, and that if only one had had a chance of this or only one had had a chance at that, things would have gone better. You would be happy if only this. That one is unlucky. All those things - and some of them may well even be true - but to pity oneself as a result of them is to do oneself an enormous disservice.

I think it's one of these things we find unattractive about the American culture, a culture which I find mostly extremely attractive, and I like Americans and I love being in America. But just occasionally there'll be some example of the absolutely ravening self-pity that they are capable of. And you see it in their talk shows. It's an appalling spectacle and it's so self-destructive. I always wanted once to publish a self-help book saying "How to be Happy" by Stephen Fry. Guaranteed success. And people buy this huge book and it's all blank pages and the first page would just say, "Stop feeling sorry for yourself and you will be happy. Use the rest of the book to write down your interesting thoughts and drawings." And that's what the book would be, and it would be true.

And it sounds like, "Oh, that's so simple." Because it's not simple to stop feeling sorry for yourself. It's bloody hard. Cause we do feel sorry for ourselves.

I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance. That is my religion, and every day I am sorely, grossly, heinously and deeply offended, wounded, mortified and injured by a thousand different blasphemies against it. When the fundamental canons of truth, honesty, compassion and decency are hourly assaulted by fatuous bishops, pompous, illiberal and ignorant priests, politicians and prelates, sanctimonious censors, self-appointed moralists and busy-bodies, what recourse of ancient laws have I? None whatever. Nor would I ask for any. For unlike these blistering imbeciles my belief in my religion is strong and I know that lies will always fail and indecency and intolerance will always perish.