Tom Stoppard Quotes
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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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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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I think theater ought to be theatrical ... you know, shuffling the pack in different ways so that it's -- there's always some kind of ambush involved in the experience. You're being ambushed by an unexpected word, or by an elephant falling out of the cupboard, whatever it is.
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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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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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My scripts are possibly too talkative.
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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 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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I write out of my intellectual experience.
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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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Information is light. Information in itself, about anything, is light.
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It's no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst.
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My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.
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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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There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.
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The fact is that people are attracted to new work and by new work.
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A writer doesn't really have much of a function on a movie set.
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On Broadway, only the fire doors separate you from the sidewalk and you're lucky if the sound of a police car doesn't rip the envelope twice a night.
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Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.
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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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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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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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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.
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James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.