Tom Stoppard Quotes
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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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I don't think Stoppardian has a precise definition.
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Normally, even if you're on the set for 12 hours, there may be only a moment or two when you are actually useful.
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It's not so much that I enjoy screenwriting, though mostly I do, but the difference is, with adaptations, somebody else has done the hard part - made up a story, provided the characters.
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If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice.
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No problem is insoluble, given a big enough plastic bag.
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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 cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.
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What a fine persecution—to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.
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It's where we're nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it's for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn't matter where on what, it's the light itself, against the darkness, it's what's left of God's purpose when you take away God.
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I read for interest and enjoyment, and when I cease to enjoy it I stop.
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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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How the hell do I know what I find incredible? Credibility is an expanding field... Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight.
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The trouble is, I can't find a part of myself where you're not important. I write in order to be worth your while and to finance the way I want to live with you. Not the way you want to live. The way I want to live with you. Without you I wouldn't care. I'd eat tinned spaghetti and put on yesterday's clothes. But as it is I change my socks, and make money, and tart up Brodie's unspeakable drivel into speakable drivel so he can be an author too, like me.
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From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.
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The causes we know everything about depend on causes we know very little about, which depend on causes we know absolutely nothing about.
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Seduced her? Every time I turned round she was up a library ladder. In the end I gave in. That reminds me—I spotted something between her legs that made me think of you.
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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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"The [London] Times" has published no rumours; it's only reported facts, namely that other, less responsible papers are publishing certain rumours.
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Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power.
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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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When people discuss his plays, he says that he feels like he's standing at customs watching an official ransack his luggage. He cheerfully declares responsibility for a play about two people, and suddenly the officer is finding all manner of exotic contraband like the nature of God and identity, and while he can't deny that they're there, he can't for the life of him remember putting them there. In the end, a play is not the product of an idea; an idea is the product of a play.
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Carnal embrace is sexual congress, which is the insertion of the male genital organ into the female genital organ for purposes of procreation and pleasure. Fermat’s last theorem, by contrast, asserts that when x, y and z are whole numbers each raised to power of n, the sum of the first two can never equal the third when n is greater than 2.
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The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.