Tom Stoppard Quotes
-
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.
-
Good things, when short, are twice as good.
-
Your opinions are your symptoms.
-
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.
-
What did you have in mind? A short, blunt human pyramid?
-
I consider myself to be a very fortunate person and to have led a very fortunate life.
-
I've lost all capacity for disbelief. I'm not sure that I could even rise to a little gentle scepticism.
-
There is no one so radical as a man-servant whose freedom of the champagne bin has been interfered with.
-
I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus.
-
GUIL: A scientific approach to the examination of phenomena is a defence against the pure emotion of fear
-
I have to go with what I do, and what I do has more to do with what people say to each other than telling a story through images. Of course, you're trying to do both. And there are some people who are brilliant at it, but I don't consider myself to be particularly good at it. My mind gets into a verbal mode.
-
No problem is insoluble, given a big enough plastic bag.
-
I love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it. I love the way it blurs the distinction between everyone who isn't one's lover.
-
An artist is the magician put among men to gratify - capriciously - their urge for immortality.
-
Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway. Guildenstern: What? Rosencrantz: England. Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?
-
A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma.
-
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.
-
They loved, and quarreled, and made up, and loved, and fought, and were true to each other and untrue. She made him the happiest man in the whole world and the most wretched, and after a few years she died, and then, when he was thirty, he died, too. But by that time Catullus had invented the love poem.
-
Let me get it straight. Your father was king. You were his only son. Your father dies. You are of age. Your uncle becomes king." "Yes." "Unorthodox.
-
Words are sacred. If you get the right ones in the right order you can nudge the world a little.
-
Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child
-
Every age thinks it's the modern age, but this one really is. Electricity is going to change everything. Everything!
-
The hard part is getting to the top of page 1.
-
Save the gerund and screw the whale.