Tom Stoppard Quotes

We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there's only one direction. And time is its only measure. ~ Tom Stoppard

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

We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. ~ Tom Stoppard

I want to support the whole idea of the humanities and teaching the humanities as being something that - even if it can't be quantitatively measured as other subjects - it's as fundamental to all education. ~ Tom Stoppard

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

Consistency is all I ask! ~ Tom Stoppard

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

I am as miserable as anyone - sometimes. ~ Tom Stoppard

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

GUIL: A scientific approach to the examination of phenomena is a defence against the pure emotion of fear ~ Tom Stoppard

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

Chekhov was capable of casually tossing off deplorable comments in his letters, combined with a very modern anger against anti-Semitism. ~ Tom Stoppard

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

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

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 ~ Tom Stoppard

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

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

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

In the end, my children put me on to Pink Floyd when they were teenagers. ~ Tom Stoppard

Since we cannot hope for order, let us withdraw with style from the chaos. ~ Tom Stoppard

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. ~ Tom Stoppard

I renounce all love except pure philosophical love. The so-called love of human animals removes people two by two from the only possibility of happiness, which is the communion of beautiful souls. ~ Tom Stoppard

Autumnal
nothing to do with leaves. It is to do with a certain brownness at the edges of the day ... Brown is creeping up on us, take my word for it ... Russets and tangerine shades of old gold flushing the very outside edge of the senses ... deep shining ochres, burnt umber and parchments of baked earth
reflecting on itself and through itself, filtering the light. At such times, perhaps, coincidentally, the leaves might fall, somewhere, by repute. Yesterday was blue, like smoke. ~ Tom Stoppard

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

I'm vaguely embarrassed by myself sometimes. ~ Tom Stoppard

They loved, and quarreled, and made up, and loved, and fought, and were true to each other and untrue. She made him the happiest man in the whole world and the most wretched, and after a few years she died, and then, when he was thirty, he died, too. But by that time Catullus had invented the love poem. ~ Tom Stoppard

Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final. ~ Tom Stoppard

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. ~ Tom Stoppard

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

Schepisi is the sort of director who could, would, and frequently did phone me whenever he came across a textual problem. ~ Tom Stoppard

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

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

'Arcadia' is obviously a play that's got interesting things in it that are perhaps quite hard to grasp. ~ Tom Stoppard

WILDE: Oh - Bosie! (He weeps.) I have to go back to him, you know. Robbie will be furious but it can't be helped. The betrayal of one's friends is a bagatelle in the stakes of love, but the betrayal of oneself is a lifelong regret. Bosie is what became of me. He is spoiled, vindictive, utterly selfish and not very talented, but these are merely the facts. The truth is he was Hyacinth when Apollo loved him, he is ivory and gold, from his red rose-leaf lips comes music that fills me with joy, he is the only one who understands me. 'Even as a teething child throbs with ferment, so does the soul of him who gazes upon the boy's beauty; he can neither sleep at night nor keep still by day,' and a lot more besides, but 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. Then we saw what we had made - the piece of ice in the fist you cannot hold or let go. (He weeps.) ~ Tom Stoppard

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

I'm not a theoretician about playwriting, but I have a strong sense that plays have to be pitched - the scene, the line, the word - at the exact point where the audience has just the right amount of information. It's like Occam's razor. ~ Tom Stoppard

Don't clap too loudly - it's a very old world. ~ Tom Stoppard

One bulls-eye and you're rich and famous. The rich get more famous and the famous get rich. You're the talk of the town ... The sense of so much depending on success is very hard to ignore, perhaps impossible. It leads to disproportionate anxiety and disproportionate relief or disappointment. ~ Tom Stoppard

Now for a handful of guilders I happen to have a private and uncut performance of the rape of the Sabine Women - or rather woman, or rather Alfred -Get your skirt on Alfred! ~ Tom Stoppard

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

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. ~ Tom Stoppard

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

It's to do with knowing and being known. I remember how it stopped seeming odd that in biblical Greek, knowing was used for making love. Whosit knew so-and-so. Carnal knowledge. It's what lovers trust each other with. Knowledge of each other, not of the flesh but through the flesh, knowledge of self, the real him, the real her, in extremis, the mask slipped from the face. Every other version of oneself is on offer to the public. We share our vivacity, grief, sulks, anger, joy… we hand it out to anybody who happens to be standing around, to friends and family with a momentary sense of indecency perhaps, to strangers without hesitation. Our lovers share us with the passing trade. But in pairs we insist that we give ourselves to each other. What selves? What's left? What else is there that hasn't been dealt out like a deck of cards? Carnal knowledge. Personal, final, uncompromised. Knowing, being known. I revere that. Having that is being rich, you can be generous about what's shared - she walks, she talks, she laughs, she lends a sympathetic ear, she kicks off her shoes and dances on the tables, she's everybody's and it don't mean a thing, let them eat cake; knowledge is something else, the undealt card, and while it's held it makes you free-and-easy and nice to know, and when it's gone everything is pain. Every single thing. Every object that meets the eye, a pencil, a tangerine, a travel poster. As if the physical world has been wired up to pass a current back to the part o ~ Tom Stoppard

I don't believe that we evolved moral psychology; it just doesn't seem plausible to me as a biological phenomenon. ~ Tom Stoppard

If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice. ~ Tom Stoppard

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

We drift down time, clutching at straws. But what good's a brick to a drowning man? ~ Tom Stoppard

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

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

Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them. ~ Tom Stoppard

Every exit is an Entry somewhere else. ~ Tom Stoppard

No one gets up after death-there is no applause-there is only silence and some second-hand clothes, and that's death. ~ Tom Stoppard

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

I'm a very boring person. ~ Tom Stoppard

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

Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe. ~ Tom Stoppard

Hell is very likely to be modernization infinitely extended. ~ Tom Stoppard

You can't but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it's a narrative art form. ~ Tom Stoppard

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. ~ Tom Stoppard

If we can't arrange our own happiness, it's a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us. ~ Tom Stoppard

I proudly tell people, 'I have no computer,' so as not to be ashamed of having no computer. ~ Tom Stoppard

I want a good story, with a beginning, middle and end. ~ Tom Stoppard

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

My life feels, week to week, incomplete to the level of being pointless if I am not in preparation for the next play or, ideally, into it. ~ Tom Stoppard

I have three copies of the first edition, which sold in double figures, speaking loosely; there was a moment when Blond's 'Lord Malquist and Mr Moon' sold 67 copies, or some such number, in Venezuela - a mystery I never solved. I have never been to Venezuela. I remember going into Foyles' bookshop in 1966 and being gratified to see a stack of Malquist-and-Moons on the New Fiction table. I counted them; there were twelve. A week or two later I went in again; there they were. I counted them again; there were thirteen! I saw at once what was happening. People were leaving my book at bookshops. ~ Tom Stoppard

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. ~ Tom Stoppard

Uncertainty is the normal state. ~ Tom Stoppard

Stark raving sane. ~ Tom Stoppard

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

Embarrassingly enough, I often can't remember how I came to write something. ~ Tom Stoppard

In Chekhov, everything blends into its opposite, just fractionally, and this is sort of unsettling. And that's why you end up 100 years later asking, 'Is that moment tragic or comic?' ~ Tom Stoppard

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. ~ Tom Stoppard

It takes a lot of effort to be vibrant. ~ Tom Stoppard

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 ~ Tom Stoppard

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

Be happy
if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving? ~ Tom Stoppard

A writer doesn't really have much of a function on a movie set. ~ Tom Stoppard

Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much. ~ Tom Stoppard

I don't know that I want to share all my most intimate secrets. ~ Tom Stoppard

I really just like to be at a desk. ~ Tom Stoppard

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering. ~ Tom Stoppard

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

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. ~ Tom Stoppard

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

Knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth. ~ Tom Stoppard

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. ~ Tom Stoppard

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. ~ Tom Stoppard

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

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

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

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

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

Fatherlessness didn't strike me as being an event. It was a state of life. ~ Tom Stoppard

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

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. ~ Tom Stoppard

For me, the reputation for teaching language in general, and East European languages most particularly, gave Glasgow University, and by reflection the country, a distinction. ~ Tom Stoppard

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

Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society. ~ Tom Stoppard

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

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