Tom stoppard quotes

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.

There we were - demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance - and every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. Don't you see?! We're actors - we're the opposite of people!

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.

Audiences know what to expect, and that is all that they are prepared to believe in.

You are an over-excited little man, with a need for self-expression far beyond the scope of your natural gifts. This is not discreditable. Neither does it make you an artist.

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

Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.

Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child

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.

In January 1962, when I was the author of one and a half unperformed plays, I attended a student production of 'The Birthday Party' at the Victoria Rooms in Bristol. Just before it began, I realised that Harold Pinter was sitting in front of me.

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.

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've never written an original piece for film; all the original things I've done are for the stage.

The whole philosophy of modern times is to dissolve distinctions between individuals and deal with them as large collections of people. It's essentially self-interested on the part of authority.

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.

Words... 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... 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.

...reality, the name we give to the common experience.

It's the wanting to know that makes us matter.

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

...Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that what is taken to be true. It's the currency if living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions. What do you assume?

I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.

It was a different planet in 1967, the Broadway theatre. It had a little ashtray clamped to the back of every seat and the author got 10% of the gross.

Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead.

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.

It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.

If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.

It's no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst.

Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway. Guildenstern: What? Rosencrantz: England. Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?

Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.

We give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain.

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.

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.

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

A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's not there.

Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.

Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.

I can't remember what my first script was.

There's something scary about stupidity made coherent.

If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.

I think theater ought to be theatrical ... you know, shuffling the pack in different ways so that it's -- there's always some kind of ambush involved in the experience. You're being ambushed by an unexpected word, or by an elephant falling out of the cupboard, whatever it is.

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

I've got no interest in educating or instructing people.

Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.

We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.

Chater: You dare to call me that. I demand satisfaction! Septimus: Mrs Chater demanded satisfaction and now you are demanding satisfaction. I cannot spend my time day and night satisfying the demands of the Chater family.

Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?

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.

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.

I doubt that art needed Ruskin any more than a moving train needs one of its passengers to shove it.

Maybe Napoleon was wrong when he said we were a nation of shopkeepers... Today England looked like a nation of goalkeepers.

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

As a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas. I have no illusions about that.

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

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.

Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.

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

A circle is the longest distance to same point.

Words, words. They're all we have to go on.

From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.

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.

Sometimes I watch a scene I've written, and occasionally I think, "Oh, for God's sake, shut up."

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

The whole notion of journalism being an institution whose fundamental purpose is to educate and inform and even, one might say, elevate, has altered under commercial pressure, perhaps, into a different kind of purpose, which is to divert and distract and entertain.

It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

People think there's a choice between smoking and immortality, but we've all got to die of something.

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.

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.

All mystical experience is coincidence; and vice versa, of course.

The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.

To the engineer, all matter in the universe can be placed into one of two categories: (1) things that need to be fixed, and (2) things that will need to be fixed after you've had a few minutes to play with them. Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

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.

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

I burn with no causes.

We shed as we pick up, like travellers 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.

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

A play that works well and is done quite a lot - I've never done the math - but it's probably more remunerative than a movie.

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

I never had any frustration about writing uncredited. I always felt that the satisfaction of doing it was in the doing of it, really, and getting recognised by the small number of people that know what you did.

Words are sacred. If you get the right ones in the right order you can nudge the world a little.

The names for things don't come first. Words stagger after, hopelessly trying to become the sensation.

We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.

Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight.

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.

I don't keep a diary and I throw away nearly all the paper I might have kept. I don't keep an archive. There's something worrying about my make-up that I try to leave no trace of myself apart from my plays.

When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.

My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.

Life is a gamble, at terrible odds - if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.

We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.

For a long time I managed to think two things simultaneously, that I am actually a good playwright, and that the next time I write a play I will be revealed as someone who is no good at all.

It is better to be quotable than to be honest.

The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.

The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.

Every exit is an entry somewhere else.

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

Your opinions are your symptoms.

I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.

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.

Sometimes directors feel a script needs something, but they're not sure what it is, so they show it to a friend; if the friend is a writer, he ends up kicking around with that script for a while.

Sometimes people are so close to the material, they miss an important cross-reference. You can't drop this line because half an hour later, it affects that line. And the writer is the person who knows that immediately.

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.

I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.

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.

I'm attracted to the past.

I smoke too much whether it's going well or badly. After all these years, I definitely associate having a pen in my hand with having an ashtray just out of eye line.

An artist is the magician put among men to gratify - capriciously - their urge for immortality.

If you took away everything in the world that had to be invented, there'd be nothing left except a lot of people getting rained on.

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.

Fantasy flows in where fact leaves a vacuum.

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.

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.

I don't think I can be expected to take seriously any game which takes less than three days to reach its conclusion.

Never believe in mirrors or newspapers.

Rewriting isn't just about dialogue, it's the order of the scenes, how you finish a scene, how you get into a scene. All these final decisions are best made when you're there, watching. It's really enjoyable, but you've got to be there at the director's invitation. You can't just barge in and say, "I'm the writer."

It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.

The idea of the state is, or should be, a very limited, prescribed idea. The state looks after the defense of the realm, and other matters - raising revenue to pay for things which are for all of us, and so on. That idea has turned turtle now. The state isn't any longer perceived as an institution which exists to serve us.

And for the last three minutes on the wind of a windless day I have heard the sound of drums and flute.

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 am not my body. My body is nothing without me.

Pirates could happen to anyone.

What a fine persecution—to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

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

A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.

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.

Give us this day our daily mask.

Personally I am in favour of education but a university is not the place for it.