Tom Stoppard Quotes

I've seldom minded other people's opinions, but the other side of that coin is that I've seldom been interested by them, um their opinions about me I mean.

You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?

"The [London] Times" has published no rumours; it's only reported facts, namely that other, less responsible papers are publishing certain rumours.

Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does.

I think that the present is worth attention, one shouldn't sacrifice it to future conceptions of, of this future or that future.

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

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

Let me get it straight. Your father was king. You were his only son. Your father dies. You are of age. Your uncle becomes king." "Yes." "Unorthodox.

Seduced her? Every time I turned round she was up a library ladder. In the end I gave in. That reminds me—I spotted something between her legs that made me think of you.

The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy.

I'm hopeless at looking into myself and trying to see how things are working and why.

If you were handed power on a plate you'd be left fighting over a plate.

I'm going to be dead before I read the books I'm going to read.

You can't but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it's a narrative art form.

Player: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life question your sitution at every turn.

It's not so much that I enjoy screenwriting, though mostly I do, but the difference is, with adaptations, somebody else has done the hard part - made up a story, provided the characters.

I enjoy writing dialogue; it comes naturally to me.

A writer doesn't really have much of a function on a movie set.

I really enjoy working on adaptations.

I don't really have a system or set of principles. It's kind of common sense mixed up with instinct.

I really love being in postproduction. First of all, it's all quite self-interested: You can protect things.

My scripts are possibly too talkative.

Normally, even if you're on the set for 12 hours, there may be only a moment or two when you are actually useful.

I don't write at the library, because I smoke when I work or would like the possibility of a smoke. Also, I need to be at my own desk.

To be frank: the translations that often sound bad in the mouths of the actors, these have often been done by linguists.

I began writing for theater, and maybe because of that I've always thought of myself as a theater writer who does work in film sometimes.

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

We're actors — we're the opposite of people!

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

What freedom means, is being allowed to sing in my bath as loudly as will not interfere with my neighbour's freedom to sing a different tune in his.

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.

No one gets up after death-there is no applause-there is only silence and some second-hand clothes, and that's death.

A lesson in folly is worth two in wisdom.

Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.

Confession is an act of violence against the unoffending.

People do terrible things to each other, but it's worse in the places where everybody is kept in the dark.

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

As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.

Kissing girls is not like science, nor is it like sport. It is the third thing when you thought there were only two.

THOMASINA:But then the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue!

Age is a high price to pay for maturity.

It's better to be quotable than to be honest.

Although I don't examine myself in this respect, I would say, off the top of my head, that I've come to acknowledge my Czechness more as I get older.

When I was 20, the idea of having a play on anywhere was just beyond my dreams.

I think... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process.

When you write, it's making a certain kind of music in your head. There's a rhythm to it, a pulse, and on the whole, I'm writing to that drum rather than the psychological process.

I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music and of aviation.

I'm a playwright who gets involved in movies when I'm not writing a play.

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.