If knowledge isn't self-knowledge it isn't doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing 'When Father Painted the Parlour'? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you. 'She walks into beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that's best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.
Tom StoppardLet me get it straight. Your father was king. You were his only son. Your father dies. You are of age. Your uncle becomes king." "Yes." "Unorthodox.
Tom StoppardOne 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 StoppardI like plays where people talk a lot. Conversation is sustained. Argument is sustained.
Tom StoppardAs 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.
Tom StoppardJames Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.
Tom StoppardFor 10 years of my life, 3 times a day, I thanked the Lord for what I was about to receive and thanked him again for what I had just received, and then we lost touch and I suddenly thought, where is he now
Tom StoppardI was so thrilled being a reporter, because it gave you the kind of access to people that you wouldn't ever get to meet.
Tom StoppardThere is no one so radical as a man-servant whose freedom of the champagne bin has been interfered with.
Tom StoppardPeople think there's a choice between smoking and immortality, but we've all got to die of something.
Tom StoppardSometimes 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.
Tom StoppardWe 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.
Tom StoppardIt 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 StoppardFor 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.
Tom StoppardMy work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.
Tom StoppardIt 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 StoppardI 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.
Tom StoppardComparing 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 StoppardLeft 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 StoppardThe idea that all the people locked up in mental hospitals are sane while all the people walking about are mad is merely a literary cliche, put about by people who should be locked up. I assure you there is not much in it. Taken as a whole, the sane are out there the sick are in here. For example you are in here because you have delusions that sane people are put in mental hospitals.
Tom StoppardBack 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 StoppardNo matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.
Tom StoppardWar is capitalism with the gloves off and many who go to war know it but they go to war because they don't want to be a hero.
Tom StoppardThe unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.
Tom StoppardThe results of the divorce between truth and human beings can be most graphically observed in politics.
Tom StoppardOn 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 StoppardIt's probably unprecedented for a filmmaker simply to take the writers' script and treat it as the instructions on the package. What really happens is you pretty much suppress your own instincts - and your own views on the matter - and write things the way filmmakers would like to have them, though the filmmakers often don't know what they want. They can only find out by reading what you do.
Tom Stoppard