Tom Stoppard Quotes
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In January 1962, when I was the author of one and a half unperformed plays, I attended a student production of 'The Birthday Party' at the Victoria Rooms in Bristol. Just before it began, I realised that Harold Pinter was sitting in front of me.
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The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody.
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The days of the digitals are numbered. The metaphor is built into them like a self-destruct mechanism.
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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.
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...Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that what is taken to be true. It's the currency if living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions. What do you assume?
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Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
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I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.
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There is presumably a calendar date a moment when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, secretly, the noes had it.
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Biography is the mesh through which real life escapes.
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Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead.
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Life is a gamble, at terrible odds - if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.
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Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.
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Never believe in mirrors or newspapers.
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Maybe Napoleon was wrong when he said we were a nation of shopkeepers... Today England looked like a nation of goalkeepers.
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the natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. strangely enough it all works out in the end... it's a mystery.
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A genuine love of learning is one of the two delinquencies which cause blindness and lead a young man to ruin.
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It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.
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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.
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I consider myself to be a very fortunate person and to have led a very fortunate life.
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You always end up with too much, so it's good to be part of the conversation about not just what you can omit, but how you are going to do the grammar of the omission, how you make things continue to work when there's something missing. It's your last chance to rewrite.
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Your opinions are your symptoms.
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I really enjoy working on adaptations.
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Sometimes people are so close to the material, they miss an important cross-reference. You can't drop this line because half an hour later, it affects that line. And the writer is the person who knows that immediately.
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The idea that all the people locked up in mental hospitals are sane while all the people walking about are mad is merely a literary cliche, put about by people who should be locked up. I assure you there is not much in it. Taken as a whole, the sane are out there the sick are in here. For example you are in here because you have delusions that sane people are put in mental hospitals.