Tom Stoppard Quotes

It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to...

Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a...

I believe in mess, tears, pain, self-abasement, loss of self-respect, nakedness. Not caring doesn’t ...

Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, ...

There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we misse...

For all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.

Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?

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

A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, ...

GUIL: It [Hamlet's madness] really boils down to symptoms. Pregnant replies, mystic allusions, mista...

We're actors — we're the opposite of people!

GUIL (quietly): Where we went wrong was getting on a boat. We can move, of course, change direction,...

You can't treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires.

The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own dev...

Rosencrantz: We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat?Guildenstern: No,...

Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.

Death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.

Free to move, speak, extemporize, and yet. We have not been cut loose. Our truancy is defined by one...

Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are...condemned. Each move...

Uncertainty is the normal state.

Death is the ultimate negative.

We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on ...

Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie t...

He's never known anything like it! But then, he has never known anything to write home about, so thi...

A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, pop...

I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.

People do terrible things to each other, but it's worse in the places where everybody is kept in the...

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

Being a person is respect, because you're not a cat or a dog or a bunch of tulips, you're a human pe...

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picni...

A lesson in folly is worth two in wisdom.

If knowledge isn't self-knowledge it isn't doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contra...

Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef.

Seduced her? Every time I turned round she was up a library ladder. In the end I gave in. That remin...

When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trail...

Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherw...

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall...

Carnal embrace is sexual congress, which is the insertion of the male genital organ into the female ...

THOMASINA:But then the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great libra...

Chater: You dare to call me that. I demand satisfaction!Septimus: Mrs Chater demanded satisfaction a...

What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?

I want to support the whole idea of the humanities and teaching the humanities as being something th...

Theater in New York is nearer to the street. In London, you have to go deep into the building, usual...

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

If I had been asked to write 1,200 words for a newspaper tomorrow, on any subject, I would just do i...

Real data is messy. ...It's all very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in th...

What freedom means, is being allowed to sing in my bath as loudly as will not interfere with my neig...

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

If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of...

A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.

I don't act, I don't direct, I don't design.

He could not put down a word without suspecting that it might be the wrong one and that if he held b...

Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.

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

Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.

No one gets up after death-there is no applause-there is only silence and some second-hand clothes, ...

When you write, it's making a certain kind of music in your head. There's a rhythm to it, a pulse, a...

For me, human rights simply endorse a view of life and a set of moral values that are perfectly clea...

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

It is easily and often overlooked that when Thomas Jefferson asserted that life, liberty and the pur...

Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.

If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that.But, if...

What is the society we wish to protect? Is it the society of complete surveillance for the commonwea...

In January 1962, when I was the author of one and a half unperformed plays, I attended a student pro...

When I was 20, the idea of having a play on anywhere was just beyond my dreams.

When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas chamber, he'd said it all.

My intention still is to write a play to commemorate, possibly rather skeptically, the 50th annivers...

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

Chekhov was capable of casually tossing off deplorable comments in his letters, combined with a very...

I'm a playwright who gets involved in movies when I'm not writing a play.

That I have the right to express myself freely at all times in all circumstances entails the idea th...

Every exit is an entry somewhere else.

Years and years ago, there was a production of The Tempest, out of doors, at an Oxford college on a ...

I think I give the impression of being a romantic, and I think inside I'm quite severe. But some mig...

Although I don't examine myself in this respect, I would say, off the top of my head, that I've come...

I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in ...

As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it...

Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge...

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

I was an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values again...

I feel that when I began writing, I had a need to know more about the play before I got into it. I t...

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

I think... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of h...

I write out of my intellectual experience.

Age is a high price to pay for maturity.

I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that a...

Everything has to be taken on trust truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency...

Like almost everything else from the West, the Romantic Revolution arrived late in Russia.

Philosophy consists in moderating each life so that many lives will fit together with as much libert...

Schelling's God is the totality of Nature struggling towards consciousness, and Man is as far as the...

We can all be clockmakers, or astronomers. But if we all wanted to be Pushkin. . .if the question is...

An artist is the magician put among men to gratify--capriciously--their urge for immortality. The te...

When I was twelve I was obsessed. Everything was sex. Latin was sex. The dictionary fell open at 'me...

The trouble is, I can't find a part of myself where you're not important. I write in order to be wor...

I love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it. I love the w...

I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have...

There are no commitments, only bargains. And they have to be made again every day. You think making ...

I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in ...

Confession is an act of violence against the unoffending.

It's where we're nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is g...

WILDE: Oh — Bosie! (He weeps.) I have to go back to him, you know. Robbie will be furious but it can...