Tom Stoppard Quotes
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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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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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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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A circle is the longest distance to same point.
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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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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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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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Give us this day our daily mask.
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If enough things that are untrue are said about you, no one will know what really is true.
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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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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 of the nice things about the world of filmmaking is that you make friends in the business.
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Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does.
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Uncertainty is the normal state.
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I like plays where people talk a lot. Conversation is sustained. Argument is sustained.
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Hell is very likely to be modernization infinitely extended.
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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 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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I began writing for theater, and maybe because of that I've always thought of myself as a theater writer who does work in film sometimes.
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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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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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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.