Tom Stoppard Quotes - Page 10

Plays...Maidens aspiring to Godheads and vice versa!

On 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.

Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don't value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last.

A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.

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

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.

It takes character to withstand the rigours of indolence.

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.

Real data is messy. ...It's all very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it's playing your song, but unfortunately it's out of whack, some of the strings are missing, and the pianist is tone deaf and drunk- I mean, the noise! Impossible!

Biography is the mesh through which real life escapes.

Good things, when short, are twice as good.

Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight. Equilibrium is pragmatic. You have to get everything into proportion. You compensate, rebalance yourself so that you maintain your angle to your world. When the world shifts, you shift.

I write out of my intellectual experience.

If enough things that are untrue are said about you, no one will know what really is true.

Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society.

The days of the digitals are numbered. The metaphor is built into them like a self-destruct mechanism.

What did you have in mind? A short, blunt human pyramid?

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.

I don't think Stoppardian has a precise definition.

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.

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

I take every possible side.

When I think of how things could have turned out, I feel as if I've dodged, not just bullets, but 6mm shells.

I'm offended by things and take pathetic little stands against them.

I'm a conservative kind of person. I don't think rightwing is quite the same thing. But I acknowledge my conservatism of temperament.