Tom Stoppard Quotes - Page 6

Writing a play is like smashing that [glass] ashtray, filming it in slow motion, and then running the film in reverse, so that the fragments of rubble appear to fly together. You start - or at least I start - with the rubble.

In January 1962, when I was the author of one and a half unperformed plays, I attended a student production of 'The Birthday Party' at the Victoria Rooms in Bristol. Just before it began, I realised that Harold Pinter was sitting in front of me.

We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.

I've lost all capacity for disbelief. I'm not sure that I could even rise to a little gentle scepticism.

the natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. strangely enough it all works out in the end... it's a mystery.

To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.

Suicide is no more than a trick played on the calendar.

In England the rich own the poor and the men own the women.

I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven't got a play cooking.

The tragedy of journalism is that these are people doing their best work.

Any revival in which I am involved is liable to change.

I like pop music. I consider rock 'n' roll to be a branch of pop music.

The causes we know everything about depend on causes we know very little about, which depend on causes we know absolutely nothing about.

War is capitalism with the gloves off and many who go to war know it but they go to war because they don't want to be a hero.

To say that it is without pace, point, focus, interest, drama, wit or originality is to say simply that it does not happen to be my cup of tea.

There is truth and falsehood in a comma.

I read for interest and enjoyment, and when I cease to enjoy it I stop.

We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now.

I can put two and two together, you know. Do not think you are dealing with a man who has lost his grapes.

Underneath runs the main current of preoccupation, which is keeping one's nose clean at all times. This means that when things go wrong you have to pass the blame along the line, like pass-the-parcel, till the music stops.

It takes a lot of effort to be vibrant.

Fatherlessness didn't strike me as being an event. It was a state of life.

One bulls-eye and you're rich and famous. The rich get more famous and the famous get rich. You're the talk of the town....The sense of so much depending on success is very hard to ignore, perhaps impossible. It leads to disproportionate anxiety and disproportionate relief or disappointment.

The truth is always a compound of two half- truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say.

can only write about what bites you.