Tom Stoppard Quotes
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Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.
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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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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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Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society.
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Once rehearsals are done the writer really doesn't have a function on the set. If the script is stabilized, then the writer becomes a celebrity tourist visiting the set, trying not to get in the way. It's very good for the ego, to go visit a film set if you are the writer, because they give you a special chair, and tell you where you can sit to watch the monitor. They make you feel special, but at the same time, they make it perfectly plain that you are irrelevant!
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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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One of the nice things about the world of filmmaking is that you make friends in the business.
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The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.
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Public postures have the configuration of private derangement.
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Player: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life question your sitution at every turn.
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A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.
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The fact is that people are attracted to new work and by new work.
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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've never written an original piece for film; all the original things I've done are for the stage.
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Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?
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You can persuade a man to believe almost anything provided he is clever enough, but it is much more difficult to persuade someone less clever.
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I write out of my intellectual experience.
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We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. but there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.
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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.
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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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There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.
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My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.
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It's no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst.
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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.