Tom Stoppard Quotes - Page 3

Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.

Save the gerund and screw the whale.

There we were - demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance - and every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. Don't you see?! We're actors - we're the opposite of people!

He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.

A circle is the longest distance to same point.

Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway. Guildenstern: What? Rosencrantz: England. Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?

I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.

The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.

All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.

In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness.

Autumnal -- nothing to do with leaves. It is to do with a certain brownness at the edges of the day ... Brown is creeping up on us, take my word for it ... Russets and tangerine shades of old gold flushing the very outside edge of the senses... deep shining ochres, burnt umber and parchments of baked earth -- reflecting on itself and through itself, filtering the light. At such times, perhaps, coincidentally, the leaves might fall, somewhere, by repute. Yesterday was blue, like smoke.

I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.

The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.

A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.

Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?

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

The whole philosophy of modern times is to dissolve distinctions between individuals and deal with them as large collections of people. It's essentially self-interested on the part of authority.

...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?

My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.

As a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas. I have no illusions about that.

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.

I'm attracted to the past.

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

We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.

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.