Tom Stoppard Quotes
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The tragedy of journalism is that these are people doing their best work.
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Hell is very likely to be modernization infinitely extended.
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I know the British press is very attached to the lobby system. It lets the journalists and the politicians feel proud of their traditional freedoms while giving the reader as much of the truth as they think is good for him.
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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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I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven't got a play cooking.
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We must be born with an intuition of mortality.
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Left to themselves people are noble, generous, uncorrupted, they'd create a completely new kind of society if only people weren't so blind, stupid and selfish.
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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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Personally I am in favour of education but a university is not the place for it.
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Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does.
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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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I'm vaguely embarrassed by myself sometimes.
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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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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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And for the last three minutes on the wind of a windless day I have heard the sound of drums and flute.
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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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I doubt that art needed Ruskin any more than a moving train needs one of its passengers to shove it.
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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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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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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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Act first! The ideas will follow, and if not - well, it's progress
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Uncertainty is the normal state.
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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.