Tom Stoppard Quotes
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I take every possible side.
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Act first! The ideas will follow, and if not - well, it's progress
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A foreign correspondent is someone who lives in foreign parts and corresponds, usually in the form of essays containing no new facts. Otherwise he's someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.
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I never had any frustration about writing uncredited. I always felt that the satisfaction of doing it was in the doing of it, really, and getting recognised by the small number of people that know what you did.
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In England the rich own the poor and the men own the women.
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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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I don't act, I don't direct, I don't design.
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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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Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society.
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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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There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.
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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 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 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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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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The tragedy of journalism is that these are people doing their best work.
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The fact is that people are attracted to new work and by new work.
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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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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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I was delighted to not go to university. I couldn't wait to be out of education.
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Information is light. Information in itself, about anything, is light.
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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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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 is better to be quotable than to be honest.