Tom Stoppard Quotes
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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.
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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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Good things, when short, are twice as good.
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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.
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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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Your opinions are your symptoms.
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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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There is no one so radical as a man-servant whose freedom of the champagne bin has been interfered with.
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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.
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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.
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GUIL: A scientific approach to the examination of phenomena is a defence against the pure emotion of fear
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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.
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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.
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An artist is the magician put among men to gratify - capriciously - their urge for immortality.
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Every age thinks it's the modern age, but this one really is. Electricity is going to change everything. Everything!
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The hard part is getting to the top of page 1.
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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.
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Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway. Guildenstern: What? Rosencrantz: England. Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?
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The names for things don't come first. Words stagger after, hopelessly trying to become the sensation.
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Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child
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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.
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No problem is insoluble, given a big enough plastic bag.
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To be frank: the translations that often sound bad in the mouths of the actors, these have often been done by linguists.