Tom Stoppard Quotes

When I was 20, in 1957, and maybe you would say I was old enough to know better, but nevertheless, I was completely nuts about Buddy Holly. And I loved pop bands that had absolutely no intellectual pretensions whatsoever. I loved the Monkees.

The days of the digital watch are numbered.

Schelling's God is the totality of Nature struggling towards consciousness, and Man is as far as the struggle has got, with the animals not too far behind, vegetables somewhat lagging, and rocks nowhere as yet. Do we believe this? Does it matter? Think of it as a poem or a painting. Art doesn't have to be true like a theorem. It can be true in other ways. This truth says there is a meaning to it all, and Man is where the meaning begins to show.

Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.

HENRY:
Leave me out of it. They don't count. Maybe Brodie got a raw deal, maybe he didn't. I don't know. It doesn't count. He's a lout with language. I can't help somebody who thinks, or thinks he thinks, that editing a newspaper is censorship, or that throwing bricks is a demonstration while building tower blocks is social violence, or that unpalatable statement is provocation while disrupting the speaker is the exercise of free speech…Words don't deserve that kind of malarkey. They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more, and Brodie knocks their corners off. I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.
Act II, Scene 5, HENRY and ANNIE

Every age thinks it's the modern age, but this one really is. Electricity is going to change everything. Everything!

If enough things that are untrue are said about you, no one will know what really is true.

Consistency is all I ask!

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.

Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are ... condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one - that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it'll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of their order, we'd know that we were lost. A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty - and, by which definition, a philosopher - dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; his two-fold security.

People think I'm very nice, you know. And I'm not as nice as they think.

It's really hard to talk about writing, and I'm usually conscious if I'm misleading people or misleading the questioner, because the problem with writing is the next line.

Rosencrantz: Shouldn't we be doing something
constructive?
Guildenstern: What did you have in mind? ... A short, blunt human pyramid ... ?

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.

Can only write about what bites you.

Seduced her? Every time I turned round she was up a library ladder. In the end I gave in. That reminds me - I spotted something between her legs that made me think of you.

...anyone with a secretary knows that what Catullus really wrote was already corrupt by the time it was copied twice...

Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.

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!

Sometimes I dream of revolution, a bloody coup d'etat by the second rank - troupes of actors slaughtered by their understudies, magicians sawn in half by indefatigably smiling glamour girls, cricket teams wiped out by marauding bands of twelfth men - I dream of champions chopped down by rabbit-punching sparring partners while eternal bridesmaids turn and rape the bridegrooms over the sausage rolls and parliamentary private secretaries plant bombs in the Minister's Humber - comedians die on provincial stages, robbed of their feeds by mutely triumphant stooges - - and - march - - an army of assistants and deputies, the seconds-in-command, the runners-up, the right-handmen - storming the palace gates wherein the second son has already mounted the throne having committed regicide with a croquet-mallet - stand-ins

The world outside of me has no meaning independent of my thinking it. (pauses to look) I look out of the window. A garden. Trees. Grass. A young woman in a chair reading a book. I think: chair. So she is sitting. I think: book. So she is reading. Now the young woman touches her hair where it's come undone. But how can we be sure there is a world of phenomena, a woman reading in a garden? Perhaps the only thing that's real is my sensory experience, which has the form of a woman reading- in a universe which is in fact empty! But Immanuel Kant says- no! Because what I perceive as reality includes concepts which I cannot experience through the senses. Time and space. Cause and effect. Relations between things. Without me there is something wrong with this picture. The trees, the grass, the woman are merely- oh, she's coming! (nervously)- she's coming in here-! I say, don't leave!-where are you going?

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.

I'm aware of my old plays and occasionally think about them, but I'm much more anxious about finding the next play.

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.

When I think of how things could have turned out, I feel as if I've dodged, not just bullets, but 6mm shells.

Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does.

Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn't take it.

I just happen to know quite a lot of what happened in Czechoslovakia between 1968 and the fall of Communism.

I wish I could remember how to write a play. I can't remember how they happened.

I like pop music. I consider rock 'n' roll to be a branch of pop music.

If I hadn't left Czechoslovakia, I would have been dead.

The thing that happens remarkably often is that the people who are writing a dissertation believe they need to speak to me in order to do their dissertation. They need to interview me.

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.

When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?

I think probably I've been influenced by Chekhov and Walt Disney, if you see what I mean.

My brain cells are dying in their trillions.

If I am on a journey where I only have time to read one-and-a-half books, I never know which one-and-a-half I'll feel like reading. So I bring eight.

Moon felt as if the conversation was a weight he had to drag along on the end of a rope.

Theater is still a medium which attracts young writers. You'd think that it would be all over by now, with television and film. But it's not.

I don't even know what my voice is to this day.

The idea that anybody might be allowed to use their common sense when clearly no harm is being done is part of history now.

In my mind, I always knew what my father looked like.

You don't often get a proposal to do Tolstoy for a really interesting director - that's easy to say yes to.

Traitors hoist by their own petard?
or victims of the gods?
we shall never know!

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

LADY CROOM: You have been reading too many novels by Mrs Radcliffe, that is my opinion. This is a garden for The Castle of Otranto or The Mysteries of Udolpho
CHATER: The Castle of Otranto, my lady, is by Horace Walpole.
NOAKES: (Thrilled) Mr Walpole the gardener?!
LADY CROOM: Mr Chater, you are a welcome guest at Sidley Park but while you are one, The Castle of Otranto was written by whomsoever I say it was, otherwise what is the point of being a guest or having one?

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.

I'm good at being funny.

Personally, I read reviews because I'm interested by them, but they don't have utility for me.

The fact is that people are attracted to new work and by new work.

The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody.

Nobody would be killed on the roads if the speed limit were 10 miles an hour.

What we're trying to do is write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might … travel … ([He] picks up the script.) Now, what we've got here is a lump of wood of roughly the same shape trying to be a cricket bat, and if you hit a ball with it, the ball would travel about ten feet and you will drop the bat and dance about shouting 'Ouch!' with your hands stuck into your armpits. (indicating the cricket bat) This isn't better because someone says it's better, or because there's a conspiracy by the MCC to keep cudgels out of Lords. It's better because it's better.

Most British playwrights of my generation, as well as younger folks, apparently feel somewhat obliged to Russian literature - and not only those writing for theatres. Russian literature is part of the basic background knowledge for any writer. So there is nothing exceptional in the interest I had towards Russian literature and theatre. Frankly, I couldn't image what a culture would be like without sympathy towards Russian literature and Russia, whether we'd be talking about drama or Djagilev.

Each move is dictated by the previous one
that is the meaning of order

I have two garden parties a year to avoid going out to dinner.

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.

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.

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

The causes we know everything about depend on causes we know very little about which depend upon causes we know absolutely nothing about.

I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.

One senses that all the Bolsheviks, even those who ended up as cold-blooded autocrats, had been on a journey from idealism to something else, and didn't notice - to mix periods - when the Rubicon was crossed.

I know the British press is very attached to the lobby system. It lets the journalists and the politicians feel proud of their traditional freedoms while giving the reader as much of the truth as they think is good for him.

So it is with us all, we're not so one-or-the-other. The one who puts on the clothes in the morning is the working majority, but at night-perhaps in the moment before unconsciousness- we meet our sleeper- the priest is visited by the doubter, the Marxist sees the civilizing force of the bourgeoisie, the captain of the industry admits the justice of common ownership.

Inside where nothing shows, I am the essence of a man spinning double-headed coins, and betting against himself in private atonement for an unremembered past.

I believe in mess, tears, pain, self-abasement, loss of self-respect, nakedness. Not caring doesn't seem much different from not loving.

The idea that all the people locked up in mental hospitals are sane while all the people walking about are mad is merely a literary cliche, put about by people who should be locked up. I assure you there is not much in it. Taken as a whole, the sane are out there the sick are in here. For example you are in here because you have delusions that sane people are put in mental hospitals.

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.

Pirates could happen to anyone.

Bernard: ... By the way, Valentina, do you want credit? - 'the game book recently discovered by.'?
Valentine: It was never lost, Bernard.
Bernard: 'As recently pointed out by.' I don't normally like giving credit where it's due, but with scholarly articles as with divorce, there is a certain cachet in citing a member of the aristocracy. I'll pop it in ad lib for the lecture, and give you a mention in the press release. How's that?
Valentine: Very kind.

A 'human right' is, by definition, timeless. It cannot adhere to some societies and not others, at some times and not at other times.

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.

He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.

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.

I like the notion of theater as recreational.

I like plays where people talk a lot. Conversation is sustained. Argument is sustained.

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.

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.

If you are well known at something else, you get points for doing stuff which lots of other people do, and much more, and they don't get any points at all. You get over-praised, over-credited.

My desk faces the water, and I'm perfectly happy sitting there. I'm never lonely.

The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.

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.

From as long as, literally as far back as I can remember I've liked puns, word jokes, I can literally recall looking at a comic at the age of six or seven and I remember what I enjoyed and what it was precisely and how the joke worked.

Poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship. There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don't like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical to ours.

I take every possible side.

The idea that public safety, the safety of the innocent, is an absolute which trumps every other consideration, is tacitly abandoned in the way we live.

Obviously, you would give your life for your children, or give them the last biscuit on the plate. But to me, the trick in life is to take that sense of generosity between kin, make it apply to the extended family and to your neighbour, your village and beyond.

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

Do not despair - many are happy much of the time; more eat than starve, more are healthy than sick, more curable than dying; not so many dying as dead; and one of the thieves was saved. Hell's bells and all's well - half the world is at peace with itself, and so is the other half; vast areas are unpolluted; millions of children grow up without suffering deprivation, and millions, while deprived, grow up without suffering cruelties, and millions, while deprived and cruelly treated, none the less grow up. No laughter is sad and many tears are joyful. At the graveside the undertaker doffs his top hat and impregnates the prettiest mourner. Wham, bam, thank you Sam.

I'm offended by things and take pathetic little stands against them.

The results of the divorce between truth and human beings can be most graphically observed in politics.

ROS: Why don't you go and have a look?
GUIL: Pragmatism?! - is that all you have to offer?

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

A lesson in folly is worth two in wisdom.

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 ...

I got dizzy," he explained.
I should think you did. What were you doing?'
Nothing," said Moon. "I was trying to face one way or the other and I got confused and fell over."
Let that be my epitaph.

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We can all be clockmakers, or astronomers. But if we all wanted to be Pushkin ... if the question is, how do you make a poem by Pushkin?- or, what exactly makes one poem or painting or piece of music greater than another?- or, what is beauty?, or liberty?, or virtue?- if the question is, how should we live? ... then, reason gives no answer or different answers. So something went wrong. The divine spark in man is not reason after all, but something else, some kind of intuition or vision, perhaps like the moment of inspiration experienced by the artist ...

It was precisely this notion of infinite series which in the sixth century BC led the Greek philosopher Zeno to conclude that since an arrow shot towards a target first had to cover half the distance, and then half the remainder, and then half the remainder after that, and so on ad infinitum, the result was, as I will now demonstrate, that though an arrow is always approaching its target, it never quite gets there, and Saint Sebastian died of fright.

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

When you write, it's making a certain kind of music in your head. There's a rhythm to it, a pulse, and on the whole, I'm writing to that drum rather than the psychological process.