Tom Stoppard Quotes
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Suicide is no more than a trick played on the calendar.
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Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light.
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The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it's trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren't supposed to be in that part of the plan.
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I don't think Stoppardian has a precise definition.
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Death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.
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A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.
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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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Fatherlessness didn't strike me as being an event. It was a state of life.
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From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.
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If you were handed power on a plate you'd be left fighting over a plate.
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Traitors hoist by their own petard?--or victims of the gods?--we shall never know!
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I'm offended by things and take pathetic little stands against them.
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Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight. Equilibrium is pragmatic. You have to get everything into proportion. You compensate, rebalance yourself so that you maintain your angle to your world. When the world shifts, you shift.
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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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Theater is a recreation. It can be much more, but unless it's recreation, I don't see the point of it.
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We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now.
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I didn't feel good about cutting out parts of very famous speeches, ... You think you somehow need all of it or you get none of it, but that's not true.
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The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.
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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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Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God's crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can't think of anything more trivial than quarks, quasars, big bangs and black holes.
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Writing a play is like smashing that [glass] ashtray, filming it in slow motion, and then running the film in reverse, so that the fragments of rubble appear to fly together. You start - or at least I start - with the rubble.
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I think that the present is worth attention, one shouldn't sacrifice it to future conceptions of, of this future or that future.
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Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight.
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If the audience is made to do not enough work, they resent it without knowing it. Too much and they get lost. There's a perfect pace to be found. And a perfect place that is different for every line of the play.