Tom Stoppard Quotes

Every exit is an entry somewhere else.

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

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.

Words are sacred. If you get the right ones in the right order you can nudge the world a little.

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

A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.

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.

If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.

Give us this day our daily mask.

Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.

It's no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst.

It would have been nice to have had unicorns.

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

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child

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

It is better to be quotable than to be honest.

Maybe Napoleon was wrong when he said we were a nation of shopkeepers... Today England looked like a nation of goalkeepers.

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

My life feels, week to week, incomplete to the level of being pointless if I am not in preparation for the next play or, ideally, into it.

I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.

It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.

Information is light. Information in itself, about anything, is light.

Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.

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

Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.

If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that. But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.

It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

When I think of how things could have turned out, I feel as if I've dodged, not just bullets, but 6mm shells.

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

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

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

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

It's the wanting to know that makes us matter.

It takes character to withstand the rigours of indolence.

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

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.

I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus.

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

I don't think I can be expected to take seriously any game which takes less than three days to reach its conclusion.

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.

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

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.

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.

We're actors. We're the opposite of people.

It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing.

Biography is the mesh through which real life escapes.

A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's not there.

James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.