Tom Stoppard Quotes

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

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

Theater is a recreation. It can be much more, but unless it's recreation, I don't see the point of it.

Suicide is no more than a trick played on the calendar.

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.

To be frank: the translations that often sound bad in the mouths of the actors, these have often been done by linguists.

Your opinions are your symptoms.

Every age thinks it's the modern age, but this one really is. Electricity is going to change everything. Everything!

I take every possible side.

GUIL: A scientific approach to the examination of phenomena is a defence against the pure emotion of fear

Fatherlessness didn't strike me as being an event. It was a state of life.

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

Poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship. There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don't like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical to ours.

Seduced her? Every time I turned round she was up a library ladder. In the end I gave in. That reminds me—I spotted something between her legs that made me think of you.

Good things, when short, are twice as good.

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

There would be this algebraic equation with an equals sign in the middle, and all the components would have different letters of the alphabet. It would come out right with x+z^2+t/q=y+co, and the co would be clothes off!

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.

...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?

Of all forms of fiction, autobiography is the most gratuitous.

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.

Any revival in which I am involved is liable to change.

Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Carnal embrace is sexual congress, which is the insertion of the male genital organ into the female genital organ for purposes of procreation and pleasure. Fermat’s last theorem, by contrast, asserts that when x, y and z are whole numbers each raised to power of n, the sum of the first two can never equal the third when n is greater than 2.

The tragedy of journalism is that these are people doing their best work.

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

can only write about what bites you.

My mind gets into a verbal mode.

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.

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

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.

In England the rich own the poor and the men own the women.

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

The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy.

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

My scripts are possibly too talkative.

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

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?

Player: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life question your sitution at every turn.

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

A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even 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 having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma.

I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation.