-
Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?
Tom Stoppard -
I've never written an original piece for film; all the original things I've done are for the stage.
Tom Stoppard
-
The whole philosophy of modern times is to dissolve distinctions between individuals and deal with them as large collections of people. It's essentially self-interested on the part of authority.
Tom Stoppard -
Death is the ultimate negative.
Tom Stoppard -
can only write about what bites you.
Tom Stoppard -
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.
Tom Stoppard -
The fact is that people are attracted to new work and by new work.
Tom Stoppard -
A circle is the longest distance to same point.
Tom Stoppard
-
Carnal embrace is sexual congress, which is the insertion of the male genital organ into the female genital organ for purposes of procreation and pleasure. Fermat’s last theorem, by contrast, asserts that when x, y and z are whole numbers each raised to power of n, the sum of the first two can never equal the third when n is greater than 2.
Tom Stoppard -
The truth is always a compound of two half- truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say.
Tom Stoppard -
A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.
Tom Stoppard -
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.
Tom Stoppard -
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.
Tom Stoppard -
There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.
Tom Stoppard
-
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!
Tom Stoppard -
Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.
Tom Stoppard -
Sometimes directors feel a script needs something, but they're not sure what it is, so they show it to a friend; if the friend is a writer, he ends up kicking around with that script for a while.
Tom Stoppard -
Player: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life question your sitution at every turn.
Tom Stoppard -
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.
Tom Stoppard -
Since we cannot hope for order, let us withdraw with style from the chaos.
Tom Stoppard
-
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.
Tom Stoppard -
Hell is very likely to be modernization infinitely extended.
Tom Stoppard -
I was delighted to not go to university. I couldn't wait to be out of education.
Tom Stoppard -
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.
Tom Stoppard