Top 100 Tom Stoppard Quotes
#1. 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.
Tom Stoppard
#3. Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over ... Death is not anything ... death is not ... It's the absence of presence, nothing more ... the endless time of never coming back ... a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes not sound ...
Tom Stoppard
#4. I'm not one of those writers who insist they don't read reviews and don't care much about them. I do read them, and I do care about them, and they're not always what you want them to be in an ideal world.
Tom Stoppard
#5. I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus.
Tom Stoppard
#6. A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.
Tom Stoppard
#7. My scripts are possibly too talkative. Sometimes I watch a scene I've written, and occasionally I think, 'Oh, for God's sake, shut up.'
Tom Stoppard
#8. As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.
Tom Stoppard
#9. The whole of life is like that now. It's even impossible to think naturally because opinion has been set out for you to read back. Originality has been used up. And yet faith in one's uniqueness dies hard.
Tom Stoppard
#10. Biography is the mesh through which real life escapes.
Tom Stoppard
#11. Like almost everything else from the West, the Romantic Revolution arrived late in Russia.
Tom Stoppard
#12. One always likes to think that other countries are not like one's own.
Tom Stoppard
#14. I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.
Tom Stoppard
#15. 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.
Tom Stoppard
#16. Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
Tom Stoppard
#17. All of my scripts are based on other people's novels. Generally, I consider myself as one who writes for theatre. I do not see film work as a continuation of writing for theatre. It is more of an interruption of the writing process.
Tom Stoppard
#18. You are the plays you write. How on earth could you write them otherwise? They're projections of your own predilections.
Tom Stoppard
#19. A writer doesn't really have much of a function on a movie set.
Tom Stoppard
#21. Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins.
Tom Stoppard
#22. I would count myself as a friend of Vaclav Havel.
Tom Stoppard
#23. People do terrible things to each other, but it's worse in the places where everybody is kept in the dark.
Tom Stoppard
#24. Real data is messy ... It's all very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it's playing your song, but unfortunately it's out of whack, some of the strings are missing, and the pianist is tone deaf and drunk- I mean, the noise! Impossible!
Tom Stoppard
#25. I flinch when I see my name in the newspapers.
Tom Stoppard
#27. I have a spasm of envy for the person that was killed by a falling bookcase, as long as it doesn't happen prematurely.
Tom Stoppard
#28. After Magritte often serves as a companion piece to The Real Inspector Hound, which I think is appropriate in at least one way: neither play is about anything grander than itself. A
Tom Stoppard
#29. I can't remember what my first script was.
Tom Stoppard
#30. I was so thrilled being a reporter, because it gave you the kind of access to people that you wouldn't ever get to meet.
Tom Stoppard
#31. There are certain sorts of jokes which have only to do with the substitution of the unexpected word in a familiar context. If you translated something into French and then had it translated back into English by somebody who didn't know the original, you'd lose what was funny.
Tom Stoppard
#32. He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.
Tom Stoppard
#33. People have quite a simple idea about 'Anna Karenina.' They feel that the novel is entirely about a young married woman who falls in love with a cavalry officer and leaves her husband after much agony, and pays the price for that.
Tom Stoppard
#34. Of all forms of fiction, autobiography is the most gratuitous.
Tom Stoppard
#35. If I hadn't left Czechoslovakia, I would have been dead.
Tom Stoppard
#36. A genuine love of learning is one of the two delinquencies which cause blindness and lead a young man to ruin.
Tom Stoppard
#37. That I have the right to express myself freely at all times in all circumstances entails the idea that free speech is a 'basic human right' possessed by each individual, and, as such, trumps the interests of the society or group, including my neighbour.
Tom Stoppard
#38. I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.
Tom Stoppard
#39. If you were handed power on a plate you'd be left fighting over a plate.
Tom Stoppard
#40. I can be affectionate about a lot of things without watching them.
Tom Stoppard
#41. The thing about talking about human rights is that when one bears in mind the sharp end of it, one does not want to worry too much about semantics.
Tom Stoppard
#42. The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy.
Tom Stoppard
#43. I loved the Beatles when they turned up, and the Stones when they turned up, and never really stopped liking them.
Tom Stoppard
#44. The printed word is no longer as in demand as when I was of the age of pupils or even at the age of the teachers teaching them.
Tom Stoppard
#46. Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn't death! You scream and choke and sink to your knees but it doesn't bring death home to anyone- it doesn't catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says- 'One day you are going to die.
Tom Stoppard
#47. I can put two and two together, you know. Do not think you are dealing with a man who has lost his grapes.
Tom Stoppard
#48. I consider myself to be a very fortunate person and to have led a very fortunate life.
Tom Stoppard
#49. The way 'star' used to be reserved for a small number of people, and when the star category became so vast, they came up with 'superstar,' and then they came up with 'megastar.'
Tom Stoppard
#50. I don't know that I want to share all my most intimate secrets.
Tom Stoppard
#51. It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.
Tom Stoppard
#52. I read for interest and enjoyment, and when I cease to enjoy it I stop.
Tom Stoppard
#53. If I see an actor in a role that is really terrifying, no matter how many times I meet him socially, I'm still frightened of him. I think he's going to hit me.
Tom Stoppard
#54. The truth of the matter is that I used to be much more - as it were - shy. Now I don't care!
Tom Stoppard
#55. The text loses its virginity simply by being staged: it's no longer the abstract ideal version; it's an event.
Tom Stoppard
#56. Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway.
Guildenstern: What?
Rosencrantz: England.
Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?
Tom Stoppard
#57. We drift down time, clutching at straws. But what good's a brick to a drowning man?
Tom Stoppard
#58. Possibly because I did start off as a journalist, my starting point has always been that you've got to keep an audience with you. Whatever you're doing, you always want a script to be a page-turner. It's very important never, ever, to feel above that.
Tom Stoppard
#59. I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.
Tom Stoppard
#60. If I had been asked to write 1,200 words for a newspaper tomorrow, on any subject, I would just do it rather than leave a white hole in the page. And I think it's a very healthy attitude to take to writing anything.
Tom Stoppard
#61. To be 64 is appalling, so what does it matter being 65?
Tom Stoppard
#62. For me, human rights simply endorse a view of life and a set of moral values that are perfectly clear to an eight-year-old child. A child knows what is fair and isn't fair, and justice derives from that knowledge.
Tom Stoppard
#63. HANNAH: Don't let Bernard get to you. It's only performance art, you know. Rhetoric, they used to teach it in ancient times, like PT. It's not about being right, they had philosophy for that. Rhetoric was their chat show. Bernard's indignation is a sort of aerobics for when he gets on television.
Tom Stoppard
#64. I don't even know what my voice is to this day.
Tom Stoppard
#65. PLAYER : It costs little to watch, and little more if you happen to get caught up in the action, if that's your taste and times being what they are.
Tom Stoppard
#66. The more doors there are for you to open, the better the play.
Tom Stoppard
#67. With plays that require any kind of reading program, I'm reading for a couple of years before using the material.
Tom Stoppard
#68. Belinsky: 'Who is this Moloch that eats his children?'
Herzen: 'It's the Ginger Cat.
Tom Stoppard
#69. Be happy
if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?
Tom Stoppard
#70. We're actors - we're the opposite of people!
Tom Stoppard
#71. 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.
Tom Stoppard
#73. Theater in New York is nearer to the street. In London, you have to go deep into the building, usually, to reach the place where theater happens. On Broadway, only the fire doors separate you from the sidewalk, and you're lucky if the sound of a police car doesn't rip the envelope twice a night.
Tom Stoppard
#74. Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.
Tom Stoppard
#75. As a child, I was airlifted out of the path of the Nazis. Unfortunately, I was parachuted into the path of the Japanese, but then I was airlifted again to India.
Tom Stoppard
#76. There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said
no. But somehow we missed it.
Tom Stoppard
#77. I think probably I've been influenced by Chekhov and Walt Disney, if you see what I mean.
Tom Stoppard
#78. When I was a reporter in Bristol, which I was between the years 1954 and 1960, the newspaper would get tickets for whoever showed up to play a gig at the big hall down the road, so I saw some wonderful people. The Everly Brothers, for example.
Tom Stoppard
#79. Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.
Tom Stoppard
#80. I seem to be failing in my intention to be as boring as I possibly can be for self-protection.
Tom Stoppard
#81. 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.
Tom Stoppard
#82. Plays ... Maidens aspiring to Godheads and vice versa!
Tom Stoppard
#83. Philosophy consists in moderating each life so that many lives will fit together with as much liberty and justice as will keep them together: and not so much as will make them fly apart, when the harm will be the greater.
Tom Stoppard
#84. The Almost Free Theatre, the Fun Art Bus and the rest of them were phenomena of a decade which was simultaneously playful and desperately serious; and
Tom Stoppard
#86. I don't think falling in love in Slovakia is much different from falling in love in Tunbridge Wells.
Tom Stoppard
#87. If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that.
But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.
Tom Stoppard
#88. Left to themselves people are noble, generous, uncorrupted, they'd create a completely new kind of society if only people weren't so blind, stupid and selfish.
Tom Stoppard
#89. 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.
Tom Stoppard
#90. Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.
Tom Stoppard
#91. You don't often get a proposal to do Tolstoy for a really interesting director - that's easy to say yes to.
Tom Stoppard
#92. People think I'm very nice, you know. And I'm not as nice as they think.
Tom Stoppard
#93. There is presumably a calendar date a moment when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, secretly, the noes had it.
Tom Stoppard
#94. Don't clap too loudly - it's a very old world.
Tom Stoppard
#95. Chekhov was capable of casually tossing off deplorable comments in his letters, combined with a very modern anger against anti-Semitism.
Tom Stoppard
#96. I was delighted to not go to university. I couldn't wait to be out of education.
Tom Stoppard
#97. Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
Tom Stoppard
#98. Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.
Tom Stoppard
#99. The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.
Tom Stoppard
#100. I'm a conservative kind of person. I don't think rightwing is quite the same thing. But I acknowledge my conservatism of temperament.
Tom Stoppard
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