Tom Stoppard Quotes
-
A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.
-
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.
-
I know the British press is very attached to the lobby system. It lets the journalists and the politicians feel proud of their traditional freedoms while giving the reader as much of the truth as they think is good for him.
-
Obviously, you would give your life for your children, or give them the last biscuit on the plate. But to me, the trick in life is to take that sense of generosity between kin, make it apply to the extended family and to your neighbour, your village and beyond.
-
We've traveled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation.
-
Suicide is no more than a trick played on the calendar.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Since we cannot hope for order, let us withdraw with style from the chaos.
-
I'm offended by things and take pathetic little stands against them.
-
If you were handed power on a plate you'd be left fighting over a plate.
-
Theater is a recreation. It can be much more, but unless it's recreation, I don't see the point of it.
-
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.
-
Fatherlessness didn't strike me as being an event. It was a state of life.
-
Any revival in which I am involved is liable to change.
-
I was so thrilled being a reporter, because it gave you the kind of access to people that you wouldn't ever get to meet.
-
Theater is still a medium which attracts young writers. You'd think that it would be all over by now, with television and film. But it's not.
-
Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.
-
Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef.
-
I've never written an original piece for film; all the original things I've done are for the stage.
-
It was precisely this notion of infinite series which in the sixth century BC led the Greek philosopher Zeno to conclude that since an arrow shot towards a target first had to cover half the distance, and then half the remainder, and then half the remainder after that, and so on ad infinitum, the result was, as I will now demonstrate, that though an arrow is always approaching its target, it never quite gets there, and Saint Sebastian died of fright.
-
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.
-
War is capitalism with the gloves off and many who go to war know it but they go to war because they don't want to be a hero.
-
Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins.