Tom Stoppard Quotes
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If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that. But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.
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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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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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There we were - demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance - and every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. Don't you see?! We're actors - we're the opposite of people!
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Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.
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Traitors hoist by their own petard?--or victims of the gods?--we shall never know!
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Fatherlessness didn't strike me as being an event. It was a state of life.
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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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Death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.
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Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
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Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef.
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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 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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Chater: You dare to call me that. I demand satisfaction! Septimus: Mrs Chater demanded satisfaction and now you are demanding satisfaction. I cannot spend my time day and night satisfying the demands of the Chater family.
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I never had any frustration about writing uncredited. I always felt that the satisfaction of doing it was in the doing of it, really, and getting recognised by the small number of people that know what you did.
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When I think of how things could have turned out, I feel as if I've dodged, not just bullets, but 6mm shells.
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My life feels, week to week, incomplete to the level of being pointless if I am not in preparation for the next play or, ideally, into it.
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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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War is capitalism with the gloves off.
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There's something scary about stupidity made coherent.
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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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Personally I am in favour of education but a university is not the place for it.
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He's never known anything like it! But then, he has never known anything to write home about, so this is nothing to write home about.
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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.