Tom Stoppard Quotes
-
I shall have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love, love, love, above all. Love as there has never been in a play. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture.
→ -
Words are sacred. If you get the right ones in the right order you can nudge the world a little.
→ -
If you were handed power on a plate you'd be left fighting over a plate.
→ -
He's never known anything like it! But then, he has never known anything to write home about, so this is nothing to write home about.
→ -
Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef.
→ -
Before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself.
→ -
I didn't feel good about cutting out parts of very famous speeches, ... You think you somehow need all of it or you get none of it, but that's not true.
→ -
A play that works well and is done quite a lot - I've never done the math - but it's probably more remunerative than a movie.
→ -
Personally I am in favour of education but a university is not the place for it.
→ -
Rosencrantz: We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat? Guildenstern: No, no, no... Death is...not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not-be on a boat. Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats. Guildenstern: No, no, no--what you've been is not on boats.
→ -
It takes a lot of effort to be vibrant.
→ -
Writing a play is like smashing that [glass] ashtray, filming it in slow motion, and then running the film in reverse, so that the fragments of rubble appear to fly together. You start - or at least I start - with the rubble.
→ -
I'm a conservative kind of person. I don't think rightwing is quite the same thing. But I acknowledge my conservatism of temperament.
→ -
...Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that what is taken to be true. It's the currency if living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions. What do you assume?
→ -
How the hell do I know what I find incredible? Credibility is an expanding field... Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight.
→ -
Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.
→ -
The trouble is, I can't find a part of myself where you're not important. I write in order to be worth your while and to finance the way I want to live with you. Not the way you want to live. The way I want to live with you. Without you I wouldn't care. I'd eat tinned spaghetti and put on yesterday's clothes. But as it is I change my socks, and make money, and tart up Brodie's unspeakable drivel into speakable drivel so he can be an author too, like me.
→ -
For 10 years of my life, 3 times a day, I thanked the Lord for what I was about to receive and thanked him again for what I had just received, and then we lost touch and I suddenly thought, where is he now
→ -
No problem is insoluble, given a big enough plastic bag.
→ -
It's silly to be depressed by it. I mean one thinks of it like being alive in a box, one keeps forgetting to take into account the fact that one is dead, which should make all the difference, shouldn't it? I mean, you'd never know you were in a box would you?... Even taking into account the fact that you're dead, it isn't a pleasant thought. Especially if you're dead, really. Ask yourself, if I asked you straight off-- I'm going to stuff you in this box now would you rather be alive or dead? Naturally you'd prefer to be alive. Life in a box is better than no life at all.
→ -
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.
→ -
It's the wanting to know that makes us matter.
→ -
You can persuade a man to believe almost anything provided he is clever enough, but it is much more difficult to persuade someone less clever.
→ -
Between "just desserts" and "tragic irony" we are given quite a lot of scope for our particular talent. Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go when things have got about as bad as they reasonably get.
→ -
All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.
→ -
Carnal embrace is sexual congress, which is the insertion of the male genital organ into the female genital organ for purposes of procreation and pleasure. Fermat’s last theorem, by contrast, asserts that when x, y and z are whole numbers each raised to power of n, the sum of the first two can never equal the third when n is greater than 2.
→ -
My scripts are possibly too talkative.
→ -
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.
→ -
Fantasy flows in where fact leaves a vacuum.
→ -
An artist is the magician put among men to gratify - capriciously - their urge for immortality.
→
Related Authors
-
Noel Coward Playwright -
Edward Albee Playwright -
Judi Dench Film actress -
Michael Frayn Playwright -
Joseph Fiennes Film actor -
Ford Madox Ford Novelist -
Arthur Miller Playwright -
William Shakespeare Poet -
Robert Harris Novelist -
David Hare Playwright -
Terry Gilliam Screenwriter -
Ed Stoppard Actor -
Joe Wright Film director -
Samuel Beckett Novelist -
Alan Ayckbourn Playwright -
Caryl Churchill Dramatist -
Felicity Kendal Actor -
Leo Tolstoy Writer -
Eugene Ionesco Playwright -
Harold Pinter Playwright