Tom Stoppard Quotes - Page 2

I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.

If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.

When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.

An artist is the magician put among men to gratify - capriciously - their urge for immortality.

Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.

All mystical experience is coincidence; and vice versa, of course.

Give us this day our daily mask.

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.

Fantasy flows in where fact leaves a vacuum.

Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over... Death is not anything... death is not... It's the absence of presence, nothing more... the endless time of never coming back... a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes not sound.

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

I can't remember what my first script was.

Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.

If the audience is made to do not enough work, they resent it without knowing it. Too much and they get lost. There's a perfect pace to be found. And a perfect place that is different for every line of the play.

The results of the divorce between truth and human beings can be most graphically observed in politics.

The whole notion of journalism being an institution whose fundamental purpose is to educate and inform and even, one might say, elevate, has altered under commercial pressure, perhaps, into a different kind of purpose, which is to divert and distract and entertain.

Pirates could happen to anyone.

I'm the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal and rebut the refutation. Endlessly.

Sometimes 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.

What a fine persecution—to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

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

The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.

Before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself.

We give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain.

It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.