Tom Stoppard Quotes
-
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.
-
A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.
-
The truth is always a compound of two half- truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say.
-
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.
-
Hell is very likely to be modernization infinitely extended.
-
Give us this day our daily mask.
-
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.
-
The tragedy of journalism is that these are people doing their best work.
-
I'm attracted to the past.
-
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.
-
He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.
-
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.
-
can only write about what bites you.
-
No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.
-
People think there's a choice between smoking and immortality, but we've all got to die of something.
-
I'm the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal and rebut the refutation. Endlessly.
-
I've got no interest in educating or instructing people.
-
Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.
-
A circle is the longest distance to same point.
-
In England the rich own the poor and the men own the women.
-
Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does.
-
And for the last three minutes on the wind of a windless day I have heard the sound of drums and flute.
-
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.
-
Since we cannot hope for order, let us withdraw with style from the chaos.