Tom Stoppard Quotes
-
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.
-
Having translated two plays by Chekhov, and not speaking Russian myself - I cannot say one sentence. This may shock people... However, I am not shocked, as it is not hard to find out what the words mean.
-
I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.
-
Suicide is no more than a trick played on the calendar.
-
We drift down time, clutching at straws. But what good's a brick to a drowning man?
-
Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light.
-
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.
-
Death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.
-
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.
-
Traitors hoist by their own petard?--or victims of the gods?--we shall never know!
-
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.
-
I think that the present is worth attention, one shouldn't sacrifice it to future conceptions of, of this future or that future.
-
The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.
-
Fatherlessness didn't strike me as being an event. It was a state of life.
-
If you were handed power on a plate you'd be left fighting over a plate.
-
Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.
-
A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.
-
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.
-
Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The whole philosophy of modern times is to dissolve distinctions between individuals and deal with them as large collections of people. It's essentially self-interested on the part of authority.
-
I'm offended by things and take pathetic little stands against them.