Tom Stoppard Quotes
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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.
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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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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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If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that. But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.
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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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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.
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ROS: Why don't you go and have a look? GUIL: Pragmatism?! - is that all you have to offer?
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I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven't got a play cooking.
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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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A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.
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Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.
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Information is light. Information in itself, about anything, is light.
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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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A writer doesn't really have much of a function on a movie set.
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In England the rich own the poor and the men own the women.
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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.
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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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can only write about what bites you.
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My scripts are possibly too talkative.
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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 don't act, I don't direct, I don't design.
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Chater: You dare to call me that. I demand satisfaction! Septimus: Mrs Chater demanded satisfaction and now you are demanding satisfaction. I cannot spend my time day and night satisfying the demands of the Chater family.
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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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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.