Tom Stoppard Quotes
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Of all forms of fiction, autobiography is the most gratuitous.
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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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I'm attracted to the past.
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Uncertainty is the normal state.
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He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.
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I really love being in postproduction. First of all, it's all quite self-interested: You can protect things.
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Hell is very likely to be modernization infinitely extended.
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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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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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A circle is the longest distance to same point.
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I've got no interest in educating or instructing people.
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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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If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could.
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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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You can't but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it's a narrative art form.
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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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Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.
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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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I'm hopeless at looking into myself and trying to see how things are working and why.
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I will take his secret to the grave, telling people I meet on the way.
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Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does.
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I like plays where people talk a lot. Conversation is sustained. Argument is sustained.
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I'm vaguely embarrassed by myself sometimes.
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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.