Oscar Wilde is his first pick but an equally famous American author is a close second.

Question: If you could have dinner with anyone, who would it be?

Stephen Fry: Who would I go to dinner with? Well obviously Oscar Wilde. I mean I know it’s just he seems to be the theme of our conversation, but he would be a good one. I’d like to go to… And I’ll tell you who else. I’d like to go… I’d like to meet F. Scott Fitzgerald. I mean I love his lectures. I think he writes amazing letters and someone who is just about the best writer his age I think, just sentence after sentence were simply perfectly made and I just want to know how he did it. That’s terrible. I just want… I mean there are other writers who you know you could regard as just as great, but something about him just so technically perfect and yet so I don’t know what it is. Whenever I read a sentence of his I think it’s so simple. There it is. It’s in front of me and all the words are easy and yet just wow and you know from his letters that he did work very, very hard at it, but I just want to know where it came from.

Recorded on December 8, 2009