Tom Stoppard
129 quotes
Biography
"I was an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values against which art could be measured. I didn't trust my own subjective responses."
"Success is a sort of metaphysical experience. I live exactly as I did before - only on a slightly bigger scale. Naturally, I won't be corrupted. I'll sit there in my Rolls, uncorrupted, and tell my chauffeur, uncorruptedly, where to go."
"Because theatre is a story-telling art form, we feel entitled to assume that the playwright got there before we got there."
"It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them."
"We're actors — we're the opposite of people!"
"I am not my body. My body is nothing without me."
"Rosencrantz: We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat?Guildenstern: No, no, no... Death is...not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not-be on a boat.Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats.Guildenstern: No, no, no--what you've been is not on boats."
"Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?"
"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."
"Age is a very high price to pay for maturity."
"What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?"
"If knowledge isn't self-knowledge it isn't doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing 'When Father Painted the Parlour'? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you. 'She walks into beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that's best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes."
"Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe."
"It's where we're nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it's for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn't matter where on what, it's the light itself, against the darkness, it's what's left of God's purpose when you take away God."
"Real data is messy. ...It's all very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it's playing your song, but unfortunately it's out of whack, some of the strings are missing, and the pianist is tone deaf and drunk- I mean, the noise! Impossible!"
"It seems pointless to be quoted if one isn't going to be quotable … it's better to be quotable than honest."
"Most of the propositions I’m interested in have been kidnapped and dressed up by academic philosophy, but they are in fact the kind of proposition which would occur to any intelligent person in his bath. They're not "academic" questions — they're simply questions which have been given academic status … Philosophy can be reduced to a small number of questions which can be battered about most bars most nights."
"I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself."
"I began my talk by saying that I had not written my plays for purposes of discussion. At once, I felt a ripple of panic run through the hall. I suddenly realised why. To everyone present, discussion was the whole point of drama. That was why the faculty had been endowed — that was why all those buildings had been put up! I had undermined the entire reason for their existence."
"I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon."
"Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering; the capacity for self-indulgence changes hands."
"Since we cannot hope for order let us withdraw with style from the chaos."
"My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers."
"When someone disagrees with you on a moral point you assume that he is one step behind in his thinking, and he assumes that he has gone one step ahead. But I take both parts, O'Hara, leapfrogging myself along the great moral issues, refuting myself and rebutting the refutation towards a truth that must be the compound of two opposite half-truths. And you never reach it because there is always something more to say."
"I agree with everything you say, but I would attack to the death your right to say it."