Tom Stoppard Quotes
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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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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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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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Personally I am in favour of education but a university is not the place for it.
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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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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 must be born with an intuition of mortality.
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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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Hell is very likely to be modernization infinitely extended.
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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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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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Act first! The ideas will follow, and if not - well, it's progress
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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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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'm hopeless at looking into myself and trying to see how things are working and why.
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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'm vaguely embarrassed by myself sometimes.
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It takes character to withstand the rigours of indolence.
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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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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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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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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.