Stoppard Tom Quotes & Sayings

Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaining it. — Georges Bataille

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

Information is light. Information in itself, about anything, is light. — 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

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

Despite the digital age, there is a very large number of venues and spaces that are looking for plays, and many of them are looking for new plays. — Tom Stoppard

One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time. — 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

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

Enchanting is not the word that would immediately spring to mind when describing a play that deals with fractal geometry, iterated algorithms, chaos theory and the second law of thermodynamics, but it is a perfect fit for Tom Stoppard's astonishing 1993 play, which is as beautiful as it is brilliant. This is one Stoppard drama that you don't have to be Einstein to understand
you can feel it as well as think it. ( ... ) Breathtaking, exhilarating and deeply satisfying. — Lyn Gardner

I don't think Stoppardian has a precise definition. — Tom Stoppard

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

You should not translate for more than two hours at a time. After that, you lose your edge, the language becomes clumsy, rigid. — Tom Stoppard

If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older. — Tom Stoppard

In an age when the difference between prince and peasant was thought to be in the stars, Mr Tzara, art was naturally an affirmation for the one and a consolation to the other; but we live in an age when the social order is seen to be the work of material forces and we have been given an entirely new kind of responsibility, the responsibility of changing society. — Tom Stoppard

I think I give the impression of being a romantic, and I think inside I'm quite severe. But some might say they had the opposite impression of me. — Tom Stoppard

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? — Tom Stoppard

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. — Tom Stoppard

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

The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists. — 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

You stupid woman, if rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans! — Tom Stoppard

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

Never believe in mirrors or newspapers. — 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

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

Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little. — Tom Stoppard

If I see an actor in a role that is really terrifying, no matter how many times I meet him socially, I'm still frightened of him. I think he's going to hit me. — Tom Stoppard

My father was a doctor in Moravia, in the south of the country. There were a number of Jewish doctors in the hospital there, and at a certain point - almost too late, really, but in time - they were all sent overseas by their employer. — 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

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

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

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. — Tom Stoppard

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

I don't look at my work in a critical or analytical way; I just don't think of myself objectively. It doesn't interest me. — Tom Stoppard

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

Good things, when short, are twice as good. — Tom Stoppard

Possibly because I did start off as a journalist, my starting point has always been that you've got to keep an audience with you. Whatever you're doing, you always want a script to be a page-turner. It's very important never, ever, to feel above that. — Tom Stoppard

Success is a sort of metaphysical experience. I live exactly as I did before - only on a slightly bigger scale. Naturally, I won't be corrupted. I'll sit there in my Rolls, uncorrupted, and tell my chauffeur, uncorruptedly, where to go. — Tom Stoppard

An artist is the magician put among men to gratify
capriciously
their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships
and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes
husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer ... — Tom Stoppard

I'm good at being funny. — Tom Stoppard

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

I am not my body. My body is nothing without me. — Tom Stoppard

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

Tom Stoppard, the English-speaking world's brainiest playwright, thinks that British audiences have grown too dumb to understand his plays. — Terry Teachout

It is of course better to know useless things than to know nothing. — Seneca.

What freedom means, is being allowed to sing in my bath as loudly as will not interfere with my neighbour's freedom to sing a different tune in his. — Tom Stoppard

I went to an English school and was brought up in English. So I don't feel Czech. — Tom Stoppard

Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe. — Tom Stoppard

One of the nice things about the world of filmmaking is that you make friends in the business. 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. — Tom Stoppard

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

The printed word is no longer as in demand as when I was of the age of pupils or even at the age of the teachers teaching them. — Tom Stoppard

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

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

If I wanted to change the world, the last thing I would do is write a play. — Tom Stoppard

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

Biography is the mesh through which real life escapes. — Tom Stoppard

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

If you're doing something like 'Arcadia' by Tom Stoppard, which has been done millions and millions of times, and it's been played some unbelievably well-respected actors, there's a lot more pressure there. But I try not to think about all the other people who have done it before me. You've got to try and be original. — Bel Powley

There are many, many more small theater spaces than there were when I was starting out. — 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

Tom Stoppard has said that the trouble with bad art is that the artist knows exactly what he's doing.) — Clive James

There's something scary about stupidity made coherent. — Tom Stoppard

To be in love with Debo Devonshire is hardly a distinction. — Tom Stoppard

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. — Tom Stoppard

The whole thing about writing a play is that it's all about controlling the flow of information traveling from the stage to the audience. It's a stream of information, but you've got your hand on the tap, and you control in which order the audience receives it and with what emphasis, and how you hold it all together. — Tom Stoppard

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. — Tom Stoppard

Because theatre is a story-telling art form, we feel entitled to assume that the playwright got there before we got there. — Tom Stoppard

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

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

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

What drove me? I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being able to take advantage of the work that's been done by others before us. I didn't invent the language or mathematics I use. I make little of my own food, none of my own clothes. Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders that we stand on. And a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something to the flow. It's about trying to express something in the only way that most of us know how-because we can't write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That's what has driven me. — Walter Isaacson

No problem is insoluble, given a big enough plastic bag. — Tom Stoppard

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

I don't find it easy to think of good stuff to write about. — Tom Stoppard

A circle is the longest distance to same point. — Tom Stoppard

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. — Tom Stoppard

I like dialogue that is slightly more brittle than life. I have always admired and wished to write one of those 1940s film scripts where every line is written with a sharpness and economy that is frankly artificial. — Tom Stoppard

I would count myself as a friend of Vaclav Havel. — 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

The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it's trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren't supposed to be in that part of the plan. — Tom Stoppard

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

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? — Tom Stoppard

Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power. — 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

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. — 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

Somebody who likes to do my plays is a good director for them. — Tom Stoppard

My brain cells are dying in their trillions. — Tom Stoppard

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

I'm hopeless at looking into myself and trying to see how things are working and why. — Tom Stoppard

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

As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it. — Tom Stoppard

I have a spasm of envy for the person that was killed by a falling bookcase, as long as it doesn't happen prematurely. — Tom Stoppard