Tom Stoppard Quotes
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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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There would be this algebraic equation with an equals sign in the middle, and all the components would have different letters of the alphabet. It would come out right with x+z^2+t/q=y+co, and the co would be clothes off!
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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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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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No problem is insoluble, given a big enough plastic bag.
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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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Good things, when short, are twice as good.
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An artist is the magician put among men to gratify - capriciously - their urge for immortality.
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What did you have in mind? A short, blunt human pyramid?
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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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Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway. Guildenstern: What? Rosencrantz: England. Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?
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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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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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Words are sacred. If you get the right ones in the right order you can nudge the world a little.
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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.
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Rosencrantz: Shouldn't we be doing something--constructive? Guildenstern: What did you have in mind? ... A short, blunt human pyramid...?
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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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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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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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I can put two and two together, you know. Do not think you are dealing with a man who has lost his grapes.
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Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light.
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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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Save the gerund and screw the whale.
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The names for things don't come first. Words stagger after, hopelessly trying to become the sensation.