Tom Stoppard Love Quotes & Sayings

The trouble is, I can't find a part of myself where you're not important. I write in order to be worth your while and to finance the way I want to live with you. Not the way you want to live. The way I want to live with you. Without you I wouldn't care. I'd eat tinned spaghetti and put on yesterday's clothes. But as it is I change my socks, and make money, and tart up Brodie's unspeakable drivel into speakable drivel so he can be an author too, like me. — Tom Stoppard

As a character in Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love, set in 1876, remarks, "Every age thinks it's the modern age, but this one really is. — Tim Wu

I shall have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love, love, love, above all. Love as there has never been in a play. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture. — Tom Stoppard

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

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

When I was twelve I was obsessed. Everything was sex. Latin was sex. The dictionary fell open at 'meretrix', a harlot. You could feel the mystery coming off the word like musk. 'Meretrix'! This was none of your mensa-a-table, this was a flash from a forbidden planet, and it was everywhere. History was sex, French was sex, art was sex, the Bible, poetry, penfriends, games, music, everything was sex except biology which was obviously sex but not really sex, not the one which was secret and ecstatic and wicked and a sacrament and all the things it was supposed to be but couldn't be at one and the same time - I got that in the boiler room and it turned out to be biology after all. — Tom Stoppard

'Shakespeare in Love' was a particularly happy film. — Tom Stoppard

Septimus: There is nothing more to be said about sexual congress.
Thomasina: Is it the same as love?
Septimus: Oh no, it is much nicer than that. — Tom Stoppard

I fell in love with literature and stayed lovesick all my life. — 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

It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them. — 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 don't think falling in love in Slovakia is much different from falling in love in Tunbridge Wells. — Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard's other work includes: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties, Night and Day, After Magritte, The Real Thing, Enter A Free Man, Hapgood, Arcadia, Indian Ink (a stage adaptation of his own play, In the Native State) and The Invention of Love. Arcadia — 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

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

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

Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self. — 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

A genuine love of learning is one of the two delinquencies which cause blindness and lead a young man to ruin. — Tom Stoppard

Independence isn't all it's cracked up to be, you know. What country could be more independent than Russia? And in Russia now there isn't a squeak or a pinpoint of light. I have nowhere to publish. The Contemporary has stuck its head up out of harm's way. So I've stopped quarrelling with the world. I sat in this chair the first morning I woke up in this house ... and for the first time ... for a long time, there was silence. I didn't have to talk or think or move, nothing was expected of me, I knew nobody and nobody knew where i was, everything was behind me, all the moving from place to place, the quarrels and celebrations, the desperate concerns of health and happiness, love, death, printer's errors, picnics ruined by rain, the endless tumult of life ... and I just sat quiet and alone all day, looking at the tops of trees on Primrose Hill through the mist. — Tom Stoppard

In 2005, I got an email from Belarus Free Theatre. They were emailing playwrights in America and England announcing their existence and saying they would like support from us. I wrote back and asked if they wanted us to visit. They said, 'Yes, we'd love that.' — Tom Stoppard

I love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it. I love the way it blurs the distinction between everyone who isn't one's lover. — Tom Stoppard

More than any other contemporary British playwright, Tom Stoppard populates his plays
from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to The Invention of Love (his portrait of the poet and scholar A. E. Housman)
with characters from life and literature. But one cannot always tell the difference between those who are real and those who are imaginary. — Mel Gussow

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

People have quite a simple idea about 'Anna Karenina.' They feel that the novel is entirely about a young married woman who falls in love with a cavalry officer and leaves her husband after much agony, and pays the price for that. — 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

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