Tom Stoppard Quotes
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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.
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Death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.
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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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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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Fantasy flows in where fact leaves a vacuum.
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Information is light. Information in itself, about anything, is light.
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In England the rich own the poor and the men own the women.
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I take every possible side.
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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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There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.
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Sometimes I watch a scene I've written, and occasionally I think, "Oh, for God's sake, shut up."
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It seems pointless to be quoted if one isn't going to be quotable ... it's better to be quotable than honest.
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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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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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It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
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My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.
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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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Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society.
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You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?
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The idea of the state is, or should be, a very limited, prescribed idea. The state looks after the defense of the realm, and other matters - raising revenue to pay for things which are for all of us, and so on. That idea has turned turtle now. The state isn't any longer perceived as an institution which exists to serve us.
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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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James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.
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To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.
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I'm a conservative kind of person. I don't think rightwing is quite the same thing. But I acknowledge my conservatism of temperament.