Tom Stoppard Quotes & Sayings

It would have been nice to have had unicorns. — 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

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

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. — 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

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

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

I take every possible side. — Tom Stoppard

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

I'm not interested in clothes; I just like them. — Tom Stoppard

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. — Tom Stoppard

What Tolstoy is on about is that carnal love is not a good idea. — Tom Stoppard

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

Theatre probably originated without texts, but by the time we get to the classical Greek period, theatre has become text-based. — Tom Stoppard

Lou Reed was a hero because he was an anti-hero. — Tom Stoppard

I think I enlist comedy to a serious purpose. — Tom Stoppard

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

I read for interest and enjoyment, and when I cease to enjoy it I stop. — Tom Stoppard

I'm very unhappy about my entire life if my writing is going wrong. — 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

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

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? — Tom Stoppard

The Plastic People of the Universe played 'Venus in Furs' from Velvet Underground, and I knew everything was basically okay. — Tom Stoppard

I'm going to be dead before I read the books I'm going to read. — Tom Stoppard

There are too many things I find it difficult to say 'no' to. — Tom Stoppard

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. — Tom Stoppard

The text loses its virginity simply by being staged: it's no longer the abstract ideal version; it's an event. — Tom Stoppard

Every exit is an Entry somewhere else. — Tom Stoppard

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. — Tom Stoppard

"The [London] Times" has published no rumours; it's only reported facts, namely that other, less responsible papers are publishing certain rumours. — Tom Stoppard

When you try to grasp the way the Western world is going, you see that we are on a ratchet towards a surveillance state, which is coming to include the whole population in its surveillance. This is our reward for accepting the restraints on the way we live now. — Tom Stoppard

The more doors there are for you to open, the better the play. — Tom Stoppard

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

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. — Tom Stoppard

When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas chamber, he'd said it all. — Tom Stoppard

I adopted England as least as much as England adopted me. — Tom Stoppard

Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God's crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can't think of anything more trivial than quarks, quasars, big bangs, and black holes.
— Tom Stoppard

ROS (mournfully): Not even England. I don't believe in it anyway.
GUIL: What?
ROS: England.
GUIL: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, you mean. — Tom Stoppard

Plays ... Maidens aspiring to Godheads and vice versa! — Tom Stoppard

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. — Tom Stoppard

Once rehearsals are done the writer really doesn't have a function on the set. If the script is stabilized, then the writer becomes a celebrity tourist visiting the set, trying not to get in the way. It's very good for the ego, to go visit a film set if you are the writer, because they give you a special chair, and tell you where you can sit to watch the monitor. They make you feel special, but at the same time, they make it perfectly plain that you are irrelevant! — Tom Stoppard

You always end up with too much, so it's good to be part of the conversation about not just what you can omit, but how you are going to do the grammar of the omission, how you make things continue to work when there's something missing. It's your last chance to rewrite. — 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

A foreign correspondent is someone who lives in foreign parts and corresponds, usually in the form of essays containing no new facts. Otherwise he's someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it. — Tom Stoppard

Act first! The ideas will follow, and if not - well, it's progress — Tom Stoppard

I'm attracted to the past. — Tom Stoppard

We keep to our usual stuff, more or less, only inside out. We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else. — Tom Stoppard

I think journalism is important. — Tom Stoppard

Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else. — Tom Stoppard

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. — Tom Stoppard

I think that the present is worth attention, one shouldn't sacrifice it to future conceptions of, of this future or that future. — Tom Stoppard

The Almost Free Theatre, the Fun Art Bus and the rest of them were phenomena of a decade which was simultaneously playful and desperately serious; and — Tom Stoppard

GUIL: It [Hamlet's madness] really boils down to symptoms. Pregnant replies, mystic allusions, mistaken identities, arguing his father is his mother, that sort of thing; intimations of suicide, forgoing of exercise, loss of mirth, hints of claustrophobia not to say delusions of imprisonment; invocations of camels, chameleons, capons, whales, weasels, hawks, handsaws
riddles, quibbles and evasions; amnesia, paranoia, myopia; day-dreaming, hallucinations; stabbing his elders, abusing his parents, insulting his lover, and appearing hatless in public
knock-kneed, droop-stockinged and sighing like a love-sick schoolboy, which at his age is coming on a bit strong.
ROS: And talking to himself.
GUIL: And talking to himself. — Tom Stoppard

'The Importance of Being Earnest' is important, but it says nothing about anything. — Tom Stoppard

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

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

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

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

I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven't got a play cooking. — Tom Stoppard

I can't remember what my first script was. — 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

I've seldom minded other people's opinions, but the other side of that coin is that I've seldom been interested by them, um their opinions about me I mean. — Tom Stoppard

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. — Tom Stoppard

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

Theater in New York is nearer to the street. In London, you have to go deep into the building, usually, to reach the place where theater happens. On Broadway, only the fire doors separate you from the sidewalk, and you're lucky if the sound of a police car doesn't rip the envelope twice a night. — Tom Stoppard

If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could. — Tom Stoppard

To be 64 is appalling, so what does it matter being 65? — Tom Stoppard

You've no idea, the whole Army's obsessed with playing at soldiers ... — Tom Stoppard

Well, we'll know better next time. — Tom Stoppard

Like most writers, I just create because I have a story to tell, really. — Tom Stoppard

I wanted to be in the theater. It is simply the way I felt. — Tom Stoppard

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. — Tom Stoppard

I was an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values against which art could be measured. I didn't trust my own subjective responses. — 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

We ransomed our dignity to the clouds. — Tom Stoppard

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. — Tom Stoppard

I'm not that taken with Freudian perspectives. They seem to be overcomplicated. — Tom Stoppard

I'm a very boring person. — Tom Stoppard

It takes character to withstand the rigours of indolence. — Tom Stoppard

Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text. — 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

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

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

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

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

Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe. — Tom Stoppard

I agree with everything you say, but I would attack to the death your right to say it. — 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

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

The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent - that rights are inherent - is unintelligible in a Darwinian world. — Tom Stoppard

I am good at being shown something and counterpunching. — Tom Stoppard

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

It could have been
it didn't have to be obscene ... It could have been
a bird out of season, dropping bright-feathered on my shoulder ... It could have been a tongueless dwarf standing by the road to point the way ... I was prepared. But it's this, is it? No enigma, no dignity, nothing classical, portentous, only this
a comic pornographer and a rabble of prostitutes ... — Tom Stoppard

I consider myself to be a very fortunate person and to have led a very fortunate life. — Tom Stoppard

The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices - after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people's. — Tom Stoppard

Can't you function unless you're losing? — Tom Stoppard

Get me inside any boardroom and I'll get any decision I want. — Tom Stoppard

Corporeal death is not the whole story. — Tom Stoppard