Top 100 Stoppard Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Tom Stoppard, the English-speaking world's brainiest playwright, thinks that British audiences have grown too dumb to understand his plays.
Terry Teachout
#3. I'm a big fan of Tom Stoppard's work, and have been since I was in school where I studied him.
Adelaide Clemens
#4. In the life of any actor or actress, there is inevitably a time when they will be eligible to act in a Tom Stoppard play. He has written a lot, and they are revived often, and there are so many characters of different ages that it was more likely I'd end up in something of his than that I wouldn't.
Ed Stoppard
#5. Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up. - Tom Stoppard
T.J. Klune
#6. Tom Stoppard was refreshingly candid when, after the successful premiere of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, he was asked what the play was about: It's about to make me a lot of money.
Clive James
#7. As a character in Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love, set in 1876, remarks, "Every age thinks it's the modern age, but this one really is.
Tim Wu
#8. Tom Stoppard's other work includes: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties, Night and Day, After Magritte, The Real Thing, Enter A Free Man, Hapgood, Arcadia, Indian Ink (a stage adaptation of his own play, In the Native State) and The Invention of Love. Arcadia
Tom Stoppard
#9. At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like 'I bet Tom Stoppard doesn't have to do this' or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling'.
Alan Bennett
#10. Tom Stoppard has said that the trouble with bad art is that the artist knows exactly what he's doing.)
Clive James
#11. The 'role of the theatre' is much debated (by almost nobody, of course), but the thing defines itself in practice first and foremost as a recreation. This seems satisfactory. TOM STOPPARD 1993
Tom Stoppard
#12. When you realize that the uncut 'Porgy and Bess' started me off, that I'd have the opportunity to do a ton of 'Stoppard,' 'Hairspray,' that I'm able to do 'Il Trittico' at the Met - how do I top that?
Jack O'Brien
#13. [James] Joyce ... an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized ...
Tom Stoppard
#14. All mystical experience is coincidence; and vice versa, of course.
Tom Stoppard
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. I think I'm a difficult conventional writer.
Tom Stoppard
#19. It was inevitable at some point that I would bump into one of my father's plays. The reality of the situation is that I'm a jobbing actor, and any actor would give their eye-teeth to have one of those roles. It's a no-brainer! I'm pleased the stars have aligned around 'Arcadia.'
Ed Stoppard
#20. It's the wanting to know that makes us matter.
Tom Stoppard
#21. 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
#22. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. If I manage to get seven hours' sleep, I'm a pretty good parent.
Ed Stoppard
#27. GUIL: A scientific approach to the examination of phenomena is a defence against the pure emotion of fear
Tom Stoppard
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. Player: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life question your sitution at every turn.
Tom Stoppard
#32. 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
#34. The days of the digital watch are numbered.
Tom Stoppard
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. Somebody who likes to do my plays is a good director for them.
Tom Stoppard
#42. A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.
Tom Stoppard
#43. And for the last three minutes on the wind of a windless day I have heard the sound of drums and flute ...
Tom Stoppard
#44. 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
#45. As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.
Tom Stoppard
#46. I think I enlist comedy to a serious purpose.
Tom Stoppard
#47. 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
#48. Traitors hoist by their own petard?
or victims of the gods?
we shall never know!
Tom Stoppard
#49. 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
#50. Biography is the mesh through which real life escapes.
Tom Stoppard
#51. Like almost everything else from the West, the Romantic Revolution arrived late in Russia.
Tom Stoppard
#52. 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
#53. Public postures have the configuration of private derangement.
Tom Stoppard
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. One always likes to think that other countries are not like one's own.
Tom Stoppard
#58. 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
#59. Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?
Tom Stoppard
#60. I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.
Tom Stoppard
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. I get the impression sometimes that a play arrives in a sequence of events that I have no control over.
Tom Stoppard
#64. 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
#65. Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
Tom Stoppard
#66. 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
#67. 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
#69. Personally I am in favour of education but a university is not the place for it.
Tom Stoppard
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. After all these years, I definitely associate having a pen in my hand with having an ashtray just out of eye line.
Tom Stoppard
#73. What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?
Tom Stoppard
#74. 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
#75. You are the plays you write. How on earth could you write them otherwise? They're projections of your own predilections.
Tom Stoppard
#76. Confession is an act of violence against the unoffending.
Tom Stoppard
#77. 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
#78. A writer doesn't really have much of a function on a movie set.
Tom Stoppard
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. Get me inside any boardroom and I'll get any decision I want.
Tom Stoppard
#82. It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
Tom Stoppard
#83. I like pop music. I consider rock 'n' roll to be a branch of pop music.
Tom Stoppard
#84. Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.
Tom Stoppard
#85. 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
#86. I retreat to my cave in a very male fashion.
Ed Stoppard
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. I'm not interested in clothes; I just like them.
Tom Stoppard
#90. There are many, many more small theater spaces than there were when I was starting out.
Tom Stoppard
#91. My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.
Tom Stoppard
#92. 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
#94. 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
#95. Since we cannot hope for order, let us withdraw with style from the chaos.
Tom Stoppard
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?
Tom Stoppard
#99. 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
#100. I would count myself as a friend of Vaclav Havel.
Tom Stoppard
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