Tom Stoppard Quotes
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If you took away everything in the world that had to be invented, there'd be nothing left except a lot of people getting rained on.
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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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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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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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I take every possible side.
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Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power.
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If rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!
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I was delighted to not go to university. I couldn't wait to be out of education.
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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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We've traveled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation.
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Normally, even if you're on the set for 12 hours, there may be only a moment or two when you are actually useful.
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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 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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You think human nature is a beast, that it must be put in a cage. But it's the cage that makes the animal bad.
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If enough things that are untrue are said about you, no one will know what really is true.
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ROS: Why don't you go and have a look? GUIL: Pragmatism?! - is that all you have to offer?
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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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Information is light. Information in itself, about anything, is light.
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I don't really have a system or set of principles. It's kind of common sense mixed up with instinct.
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I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.
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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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Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef.
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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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What a fine persecution—to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.