Tom Stoppard Quotes
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Suicide is no more than a trick played on the calendar.
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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 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.
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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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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 out of my intellectual experience.
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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.
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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.
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If you were handed power on a plate you'd be left fighting over a plate.
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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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Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?
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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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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.
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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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I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.
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I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven't got a play cooking.
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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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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.
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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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I'm offended by things and take pathetic little stands against them.
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Traitors hoist by their own petard?--or victims of the gods?--we shall never know!
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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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Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.
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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.