Top 100 Quotes About Tom Stoppard

#1. [James] Joyce ... an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized ...

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #198
#2. All mystical experience is coincidence; and vice versa, of course.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #4196
#3. It's very common for people to recommend something to me because they're going on what I've already written, when, what really is the case, is that you want to write about something you haven't written about, in ways that you haven't done before.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #9091
#4. Septimus: There is nothing more to be said about sexual congress.
Thomasina: Is it the same as love?
Septimus: Oh no, it is much nicer than that.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #11042
#5. 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

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #15695
#6. I think I'm a difficult conventional writer.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #20762
#7. It's the wanting to know that makes us matter.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #27077
#8. I'm not like some other writers: I have no actual urgent need or desire to add to what's written. You write it; if you're lucky, it's performed, and that's the end of the whole thing.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #31451
#9. 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.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #37641
#10. Your opinions are your symptoms.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #40797
#11. 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

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #46853
#12. You do know what's coming up when you're translating. I suppose the concentration, then, is on finding a formulation which is speakable and in character - and economical as well, actually.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #48632
#13. GUIL: A scientific approach to the examination of phenomena is a defence against the pure emotion of fear

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #53859
#14. 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.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #55624
#15. 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

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #63304
#16. Kissing girls is not like science, nor is it like sport. It is the third thing when you thought there were only two.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #67259
#17. Player: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life question your sitution at every turn.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #67409
#18. Pink Floyd are one of a handful of bands I've listened to a lot and whose concerts I've been to. I love the experience. I don't dance; I just jig up and down like everybody else.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #69528
#19. It takes a lot of effort to be vibrant.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #70256
#20. The days of the digital watch are numbered.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #71185
#21. Septimus. When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be all alone, on an empty shore.
Thomasina. Then we will dance. Is this a waltz?

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #72598
#22. What is the society we wish to protect? Is it the society of complete surveillance for the commonwealth? Is this the wealth we seek to have in common - optimal security at the cost of maximal surveillance?

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #77259
#23. Rewriting isn't just about dialogue; it's the order of the scenes, how you finish a scene, how you get into a scene.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #77694
#24. 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

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #80158
#25. I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #84084
#26. We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #84981
#27. Somebody who likes to do my plays is a good director for them.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #85544
#28. A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #86279
#29. I remember Tom Stoppard saying to me when I came out, 'I feel so sorry for you, because you'll never have children.' These days I would say, 'Well, why not, Tom?'

Ian McKellen

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #88154
#30. And for the last three minutes on the wind of a windless day I have heard the sound of drums and flute ...

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #118035
#31. 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

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #128374
#32. Tom Stoppard, the English-speaking world's brainiest playwright, thinks that British audiences have grown too dumb to understand his plays.

Terry Teachout

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #129834
#33. As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #139812
#34. I think I enlist comedy to a serious purpose.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #141319
#35. I learned three things in Zurich during the war. I wrote them down. Firstly, you're either a revolutionary or you're not, and if you're not you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can't be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary ... I forget the third thing.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #141578
#36. Traitors hoist by their own petard?
or victims of the gods?
we shall never know!

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #149423
#37. 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

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #149472
#38. Biography is the mesh through which real life escapes.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #158394
#39. Like almost everything else from the West, the Romantic Revolution arrived late in Russia.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #160467
#40. I don't believe there is something called 'film' and something called 'theater,' and that words belong in the theater. Some rather bad films have few words in them; some good films have a lot of words in them.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #168622
#41. Public postures have the configuration of private derangement.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #173096
#42. 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.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #173204
#43. Dotty (off): HELP!
...
Archie: It's all right - just exhibitionism: what we psychiatrists call 'a cry for help'.
Bones: But it was a cry for help.
Archie: Perhaps I'm not making myself clear. All exhibitionism is a crey for help, but a cry for help as such is only exhibitionism.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #177544
#44. One always likes to think that other countries are not like one's own.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #183914
#45. I think journalism is important.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #184015
#46. I'm so grateful to grab hold of something that wants to be a play. It doesn't happen very often. I don't have unwritten plays waiting for their turn.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #187600
#47. Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #191319
#48. I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #191818
#49. 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

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #200166
#50. I've never really worked out this thought, and I don't know if I'm really conscious of it, but I can see there's an attraction about writing about a period that's over and isn't going to change colour while you look at it.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #205022
#51. I get the impression sometimes that a play arrives in a sequence of events that I have no control over.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #206423
#52. To wrap up the idea of 'Parade's End' in a sentence or two, I would say it's a love story in which we see a man with two women, and we know what's attractive about them. And we know why and what they feel about him.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #208210
#53. Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #211910
#54. It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing ... A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #212646
#55. You think human nature is a beast, that it must be put in a cage. But it's the cage that makes the animal bad.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #217485
#56. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #217767
#57. Personally I am in favour of education but a university is not the place for it.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #223527
#58. Gallons of ink and miles of typewriter ribbon expended on the misery of the unrequited lover; not a word about the utter tedium of the unrequiting.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #228389
#59. Very often in Chekhov, where he exhibits a little bit of human behavior that you recognize as true, you give a little laugh. It's like a reflex.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #234129
#60. After all these years, I definitely associate having a pen in my hand with having an ashtray just out of eye line.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #234558
#61. What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #236446
#62. 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

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #236997
#63. You are the plays you write. How on earth could you write them otherwise? They're projections of your own predilections.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #238716
#64. Confession is an act of violence against the unoffending.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #239722
#65. When I was younger, I could do something useful just by being free for half a day, but now I need five days to get the world I've left out of my head and ten days or a fortnight not talking to anyone to hold what I need to hold inside my head.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #246663
#66. A writer doesn't really have much of a function on a movie set.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #260368
#67. I think ... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #264259
#68. VALENTINE: Are you talking about Lord Byron, the poet?
BERNARD: No, you fucking idiot, we're talking about Lord Byron, the chartered accountant.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #266401
#69. Get me inside any boardroom and I'll get any decision I want.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #267124
#70. It is better to be quotable than to be honest.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #272633
#71. I like pop music. I consider rock 'n' roll to be a branch of pop music.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #286141
#72. Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #288127
#73. You end up going to school plays quite a bit as a parent, there are a lot of kids who are doing the job as well as they can, but there's always one or two who seem much more at home in the world of impersonation.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #289525
#74. I don't feel that I belong anywhere. Or rather, if there's a place I belong, I don't feel I'm there.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #299387
#75. GUIL: I think I have it. A man talking sense to himself is no madder then a man talking nonsense not to himself.
ROS: Or just as mad.
GUIL: Or just as mad.
ROS: And he does both.
GUIL: So there you are.
ROS: Stark raving sane.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #306404
#76. I'm not interested in clothes; I just like them.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #312761
#77. There are many, many more small theater spaces than there were when I was starting out.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #316370
#78. My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #319833
#79. 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.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #323784
#80. I don't draw on my inner life in my work.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #325790
#81. 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.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #327458
#82. Since we cannot hope for order, let us withdraw with style from the chaos.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #328718
#83. 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.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #336735
#84. 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

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #338616
#85. You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #341993
#86. It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #350802
#87. I would count myself as a friend of Vaclav Havel.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #351494
#88. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. strangely enough it all works out in the end ... it's a mystery.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #359678
#89. People do terrible things to each other, but it's worse in the places where everybody is kept in the dark.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #361210
#90. I have two garden parties a year to avoid going out to dinner.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #364598
#91. To say that it is without pace, point, focus, interest, drama, wit or originality is to say simply that it does not happen to be my cup of tea.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #372001
#92. I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #372354
#93. The tragedy of journalism is that these are people doing their best work.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #374804
#94. I am as miserable as anyone - sometimes.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #377945
#95. My family was in Singapore when the Japanese War started. We were in Singapore at the time of Pearl Harbor, and by the beginning of 1942, the Japanese invasion of Burma and Singapore had started.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #384738
#96. 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.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #389322
#97. There's something scary about stupidity made coherent.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #394709
#98. I don't look at my work in a critical or analytical way; I just don't think of myself objectively. It doesn't interest me.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #397172
#99. The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about - clouds - daffodils - waterfalls - what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in - these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #408607
#100. THOMASINA:
But then the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue!

Tom Stoppard

Quotes About Tom Stoppard #417428

Famous Authors

Popular Topics

Scroll to Top