Tom Stoppard Quotes

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

Words are sacred. If you get the right ones in the right order you can nudge the world a little.

Every exit is an entry somewhere else.

It's the wanting to know that makes us matter.

If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.

Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child

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

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.

Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.

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.

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight.

There's something scary about stupidity made coherent.

Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.

It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.

The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.

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

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

It is better to be quotable than to be honest.

Never believe in mirrors or newspapers.

I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.

I think theater ought to be theatrical ... you know, shuffling the pack in different ways so that it's -- there's always some kind of ambush involved in the experience. You're being ambushed by an unexpected word, or by an elephant falling out of the cupboard, whatever it is.

Since we cannot hope for order, let us withdraw with style from the chaos.

If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that. But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.

Your opinions are your symptoms.