Tom Stoppard Quotes - Page 5

I've got no interest in educating or instructing people.

I'm so grateful to grab hold of something that wants to be a play. It doesn't happen very often. I don't have unwritten plays waiting for their turn.

It was a different planet in 1967, the Broadway theatre. It had a little ashtray clamped to the back of every seat and the author got 10% of the gross.

...reality, the name we give to the common experience.

The idea of the state is, or should be, a very limited, prescribed idea. The state looks after the defense of the realm, and other matters - raising revenue to pay for things which are for all of us, and so on. That idea has turned turtle now. The state isn't any longer perceived as an institution which exists to serve us.

It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

Chater: You dare to call me that. I demand satisfaction! Septimus: Mrs Chater demanded satisfaction and now you are demanding satisfaction. I cannot spend my time day and night satisfying the demands of the Chater family.

The fact is that people are attracted to new work and by new work.

The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.

How the hell do I know what I find incredible? Credibility is an expanding field... Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight.

The names for things don't come first. Words stagger after, hopelessly trying to become the sensation.

I doubt that art needed Ruskin any more than a moving train needs one of its passengers to shove it.

A play that works well and is done quite a lot - I've never done the math - but it's probably more remunerative than a movie.

Sometimes directors feel a script needs something, but they're not sure what it is, so they show it to a friend; if the friend is a writer, he ends up kicking around with that script for a while.

Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins.

You are an over-excited little man, with a need for self-expression far beyond the scope of your natural gifts. This is not discreditable. Neither does it make you an artist.

We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.

I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.

I've never written an original piece for film; all the original things I've done are for the stage.

From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.

I smoke too much whether it's going well or badly. After all these years, I definitely associate having a pen in my hand with having an ashtray just out of eye line.

He's never known anything like it! But then, he has never known anything to write home about, so this is nothing to write home about.

Sometimes I watch a scene I've written, and occasionally I think, "Oh, for God's sake, shut up."

There is presumably a calendar date a moment when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, secretly, the noes had it.

There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.