-
Traitors hoist by their own petard?--or victims of the gods?--we shall never know!
Tom Stoppard -
There's something scary about stupidity made coherent.
Tom Stoppard
-
You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?
Tom Stoppard -
I think that the present is worth attention, one shouldn't sacrifice it to future conceptions of, of this future or that future.
Tom Stoppard -
The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.
Tom Stoppard -
I'm a conservative kind of person. I don't think rightwing is quite the same thing. But I acknowledge my conservatism of temperament.
Tom Stoppard -
Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.
Tom Stoppard -
...reality, the name we give to the common experience.
Tom Stoppard
-
I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.
Tom Stoppard -
If rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!
Tom Stoppard -
My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.
Tom Stoppard -
Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society.
Tom Stoppard -
I really love being in postproduction. First of all, it's all quite self-interested: You can protect things.
Tom Stoppard -
Any revival in which I am involved is liable to change.
Tom Stoppard
-
No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.
Tom Stoppard -
Normally, even if you're on the set for 12 hours, there may be only a moment or two when you are actually useful.
Tom Stoppard -
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.
Tom Stoppard -
You can't but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it's a narrative art form.
Tom Stoppard -
It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
Tom Stoppard -
I take every possible side.
Tom Stoppard
-
It was a different planet in 1967, the Broadway theatre. It had a little ashtray clamped to the back of every seat and the author got 10% of the gross.
Tom Stoppard -
Public postures have the configuration of private derangement.
Tom Stoppard -
Death is the ultimate negative.
Tom Stoppard -
Rosencrantz: We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat? Guildenstern: No, no, no... Death is...not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not-be on a boat. Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats. Guildenstern: No, no, no--what you've been is not on boats.
Tom Stoppard