Tom Stoppard Quotes
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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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The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.
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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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To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.
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War is capitalism with the gloves off.
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Fatherlessness didn't strike me as being an event. It was a state of life.
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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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Of all forms of fiction, autobiography is the most gratuitous.
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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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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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To say that it is without pace, point, focus, interest, drama, wit or originality is to say simply that it does not happen to be my cup of tea.
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Death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.
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It seems pointless to be quoted if one isn't going to be quotable ... it's better to be quotable than honest.
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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 cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.
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We give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain.
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A writer doesn't really have much of a function on a movie set.
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My scripts are possibly too talkative.
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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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I shall have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love, love, love, above all. Love as there has never been in a play. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture.
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Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?
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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 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.