Tom Stoppard Quotes
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One of the nice things about the world of filmmaking is that you make friends in the business.
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I like plays where people talk a lot. Conversation is sustained. Argument is sustained.
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No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.
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The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices—after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people's.
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Most British playwrights of my generation, as well as younger folks, apparently feel somewhat obliged to Russian literature - and not only those writing for theatres. Russian literature is part of the basic background knowledge for any writer. So there is nothing exceptional in the interest I had towards Russian literature and theatre. Frankly, I couldn't image what a culture would be like without sympathy towards Russian literature and Russia, whether we'd be talking about drama or Djagilev.
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The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.
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The truth is always a compound of two half- truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say.
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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.
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Give us this day our daily mask.
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We must be born with an intuition of mortality.
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Hell is very likely to be modernization infinitely extended.
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Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever. It must have been shattering, stamped into one’s memory. And yet, I can’t remember it.
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When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.
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I've got no interest in educating or instructing people.
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I'm hopeless at looking into myself and trying to see how things are working and why.
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It takes character to withstand the rigours of indolence.
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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.
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One bulls-eye and you're rich and famous. The rich get more famous and the famous get rich. You're the talk of the town....The sense of so much depending on success is very hard to ignore, perhaps impossible. It leads to disproportionate anxiety and disproportionate relief or disappointment.
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I don't write at the library, because I smoke when I work or would like the possibility of a smoke. Also, I need to be at my own desk.
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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.
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My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.
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We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.
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Poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship. There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don't like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical to ours.
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I'm vaguely embarrassed by myself sometimes.