Tom Stoppard Quotes
-
Fantasy flows in where fact leaves a vacuum.
-
Any revival in which I am involved is liable to change.
-
We've traveled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I take every possible side.
-
Since we cannot hope for order, let us withdraw with style from the chaos.
-
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.
-
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.
-
If rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!
-
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
-
It seems pointless to be quoted if one isn't going to be quotable ... it's better to be quotable than honest.
-
I write out of my intellectual experience.
-
Of all forms of fiction, autobiography is the most gratuitous.
-
It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.
-
There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.
-
The fact is that people are attracted to new work and by new work.
-
My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.
-
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.
-
I was delighted to not go to university. I couldn't wait to be out of education.
-
Pirates could happen to anyone.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.