Tom Stoppard Quotes

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If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.

From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.

Good things, when short, are twice as good.

Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.

A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.

My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.

Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?

Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.

The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.

Every exit is an entry somewhere else.

I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

The days of the digital watch are numbered.

Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.

James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.

Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power.

The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.

We're actors. We're the opposite of people.

Life in a box is better than no life at all... I expect.

I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation.

It was a different planet in 1967, the Broadway theatre. It had a little ashtray clamped to the back of every seat and the author got 10% of the gross.

If enough things that are untrue are said about you, no one will know what really is true.

I burn with no causes.

I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.

Fatherlessness didn't strike me as being an event. It was a state of life.

I'm so grateful to grab hold of something that wants to be a play. It doesn't happen very often. I don't have unwritten plays waiting for their turn.

I take every possible side.

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

You can't but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it's a narrative art form.

I never had any frustration about writing uncredited. I always felt that the satisfaction of doing it was in the doing of it, really, and getting recognised by the small number of people that know what you did.

The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy.

I was so thrilled being a reporter, because it gave you the kind of access to people that you wouldn't ever get to meet.

I've got no interest in educating or instructing people.

From as long as, literally as far back as I can remember I've liked puns, word jokes, I can literally recall looking at a comic at the age of six or seven and I remember what I enjoyed and what it was precisely and how the joke worked.

I've seldom minded other people's opinions, but the other side of that coin is that I've seldom been interested by them, um their opinions about me I mean.

Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society.

I think that the present is worth attention, one shouldn't sacrifice it to future conceptions of, of this future or that future.

If the audience is made to do not enough work, they resent it without knowing it. Too much and they get lost. There's a perfect pace to be found. And a perfect place that is different for every line of the play.

I'm a conservative kind of person. I don't think rightwing is quite the same thing. But I acknowledge my conservatism of temperament.

My life feels, week to week, incomplete to the level of being pointless if I am not in preparation for the next play or, ideally, into it.

I'm vaguely embarrassed by myself sometimes.

I'm offended by things and take pathetic little stands against them.

I don't think Stoppardian has a precise definition.

I was delighted to not go to university. I couldn't wait to be out of education.

As a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas. I have no illusions about that.

For a long time I managed to think two things simultaneously, that I am actually a good playwright, and that the next time I write a play I will be revealed as someone who is no good at all.

I'm attracted to the past.

I'm hopeless at looking into myself and trying to see how things are working and why.

The whole philosophy of modern times is to dissolve distinctions between individuals and deal with them as large collections of people. It's essentially self-interested on the part of authority.

I write out of my intellectual experience.

I like pop music. I consider rock 'n' roll to be a branch of pop music.

I feel overestimated.

The fact is that people are attracted to new work and by new work.

In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness.

I read for interest and enjoyment, and when I cease to enjoy it I stop.

A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.

Any revival in which I am involved is liable to change.

I don't keep a diary and I throw away nearly all the paper I might have kept. I don't keep an archive. There's something worrying about my make-up that I try to leave no trace of myself apart from my plays.

I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven't got a play cooking.

The whole notion of journalism being an institution whose fundamental purpose is to educate and inform and even, one might say, elevate, has altered under commercial pressure, perhaps, into a different kind of purpose, which is to divert and distract and entertain.

I can't remember what my first script was.

I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.

I consider myself to be a very fortunate person and to have led a very fortunate life.

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.

It is better to be quotable than to be honest.

It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.

My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.

It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing.

Life is a gamble, at terrible odds - if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.

If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.

We give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain.

Get me inside any boardroom and I'll get any decision I want.

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