Tom Stoppard Quotes
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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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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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Audiences know what to expect, and that is all that they are prepared to believe in.
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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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Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
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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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Life is a gamble, at terrible odds - if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.
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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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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.
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Underneath runs the main current of preoccupation, which is keeping one's nose clean at all times. This means that when things go wrong you have to pass the blame along the line, like pass-the-parcel, till the music stops.
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Never believe in mirrors or newspapers.
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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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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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I really enjoy working on adaptations.
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Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.
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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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We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.
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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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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.
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What did you have in mind? A short, blunt human pyramid?
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I've lost all capacity for disbelief. I'm not sure that I could even rise to a little gentle scepticism.