Tom Stoppard Quotes
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Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.
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We give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain.
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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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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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Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final.
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Fatherlessness didn't strike me as being an event. It was a state of life.
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I've never written an original piece for film; all the original things I've done are for the stage.
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I'm offended by things and take pathetic little stands against them.
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I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.
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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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People think there's a choice between smoking and immortality, but we've all got to die of something.
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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.
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I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.
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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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War is capitalism with the gloves off.
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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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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.
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It's no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst.
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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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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.
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Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef.
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Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.
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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.
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Fantasy flows in where fact leaves a vacuum.