Tom Stoppard Quotes - Page 11

There is no one so radical as a man-servant whose freedom of the champagne bin has been interfered with.

Uncertainty is the normal state.

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

ROS: Why don't you go and have a look? GUIL: Pragmatism?! - is that all you have to offer?

I feel overestimated.

Hell is very likely to be modernization infinitely extended.

It's silly to be depressed by it. I mean one thinks of it like being alive in a box, one keeps forgetting to take into account the fact that one is dead, which should make all the difference, shouldn't it? I mean, you'd never know you were in a box would you?... Even taking into account the fact that you're dead, it isn't a pleasant thought. Especially if you're dead, really. Ask yourself, if I asked you straight off-- I'm going to stuff you in this box now would you rather be alive or dead? Naturally you'd prefer to be alive. Life in a box is better than no life at all.

War is capitalism with the gloves off.

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!

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.

I know the British press is very attached to the lobby system. It lets the journalists and the politicians feel proud of their traditional freedoms while giving the reader as much of the truth as they think is good for him.

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.

"The [London] Times" has published no rumours; it's only reported facts, namely that other, less responsible papers are publishing certain rumours.

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.

Death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.

The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it's trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren't supposed to be in that part of the plan.

For all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.

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.

Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef.

You think human nature is a beast, that it must be put in a cage. But it's the cage that makes the animal bad.

I don't really have a system or set of principles. It's kind of common sense mixed up with instinct.

It's not so much that I enjoy screenwriting, though mostly I do, but the difference is, with adaptations, somebody else has done the hard part - made up a story, provided the characters.

I really enjoy working on adaptations.

It'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.

A writer doesn't really have much of a function on a movie set.