Tom Stoppard's Quotes

It's better to be quotable than to be honest.

James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.

Life in a box is better than no life at all... I expect.

My life feels, week to week, incomplete to the level of being pointless if I am not in preparation for the next play or, ideally, into it.

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.

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.

The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.

The days of the digital watch are numbered.

The fact is that people are attracted to new work and by new work.

The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy.

The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.

Theater is still a medium which attracts young writers. You'd think that it would be all over by now, with television and film. But it's not.

Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society.

If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

From as long as, literally as far back as I can remember I've liked puns, word jokes, I can literally recall looking at a comic at the age of six or seven and I remember what I enjoyed and what it was precisely and how the joke worked.

In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness.

I don't keep a diary and I throw away nearly all the paper I might have kept. I don't keep an archive. There's something worrying about my make-up that I try to leave no trace of myself apart from my plays.

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.

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

I've seldom minded other people's opinions, but the other side of that coin is that I've seldom been interested by them, um their opinions about me I mean.

The whole notion of journalism being an institution whose fundamental purpose is to educate and inform and even, one might say, elevate, has altered under commercial pressure, perhaps, into a different kind of purpose, which is to divert and distract and entertain.

As a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas. I have no illusions about that.

For a long time I managed to think two things simultaneously, that I am actually a good playwright, and that the next time I write a play I will be revealed as someone who is no good at all.

I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation.

If the audience is made to do not enough work, they resent it without knowing it. Too much and they get lost. There's a perfect pace to be found. And a perfect place that is different for every line of the play.

It was a different planet in 1967, the Broadway theatre. It had a little ashtray clamped to the back of every seat and the author got 10% of the gross.

The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.

The idea of the state is, or should be, a very limited, prescribed idea. The state looks after the defense of the realm, and other matters - raising revenue to pay for things which are for all of us, and so on. That idea has turned turtle now. The state isn't any longer perceived as an institution which exists to serve us.

The whole philosophy of modern times is to dissolve distinctions between individuals and deal with them as large collections of people. It's essentially self-interested on the part of authority.

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.

A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.

I'm hopeless at looking into myself and trying to see how things are working and why.

It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.

Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.

I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.

My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.

Every exit is an entry somewhere else.

I'm vaguely embarrassed by myself sometimes.

We're actors. We're the opposite of people.

Good things, when short, are twice as good.

I consider myself to be a very fortunate person and to have led a very fortunate life.

I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.

Life is a gamble, at terrible odds - if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.

We give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain.

Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.

From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.

Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?

I like pop music. I consider rock 'n' roll to be a branch of pop music.

I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven't got a play cooking.

I'm offended by things and take pathetic little stands against them.