Top 475 Quotes & Sayings by Tom Stoppard

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English dramatist Tom Stoppard.

Last updated on September 17, 2024.

Sir Tom Stoppard is a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covers the themes of human rights, censorship, and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical thematics of society. Stoppard has been a playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. Stoppard was knighted for his contribution to theatre by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997.

English - Dramatist | Born: July 3, 1937

Source: Wikipedia

My brain cells are dying in their trillions.

Tom Stoppard

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

Tom Stoppard

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

Tom Stoppard

The idea that public safety, the safety of the innocent, is an absolute which trumps every other consideration, is tacitly abandoned in the way we live.

Tom Stoppard

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

Tom Stoppard

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

Tom Stoppard

'Shakespeare in Love' was a particularly happy film.

Tom Stoppard

I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.

Tom Stoppard

The whole philosophy of modern times is to dissolve distinctions between individuals and deal with them as large collections of people. It's essentially self-interested on the part of authority.

Tom Stoppard

I am not a mathematician, but I was aware that for centuries, mathematics was considered the queen of the sciences because it claimed certainty. It was grounded on some fundamental certainties - axioms - that led to others.

Tom Stoppard

The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.

Tom Stoppard

All your life, you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.

Tom Stoppard

I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation.

Tom Stoppard

Time is short, life is short, there's a lot to know. So I skip the entertainers in the newspaper now. I just haven't got time.

Tom Stoppard

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

Tom Stoppard

Good things, when short, are twice as good.

Tom Stoppard

Embarrassingly enough, I often can't remember how I came to write something.

Tom Stoppard

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.

Tom Stoppard

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

Tom Stoppard

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

Tom Stoppard

Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.

Tom Stoppard

My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.

Tom Stoppard

Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.

Tom Stoppard

Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.

Tom Stoppard

Life is a gamble, at terrible odds - if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.

Tom Stoppard

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

Tom Stoppard

I don't do interviews under false pretenses.

Tom Stoppard

Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?

Tom Stoppard

Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.

Tom Stoppard

Get me inside any boardroom and I'll get any decision I want.

Tom Stoppard

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

Tom Stoppard

When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas chamber, he'd said it all.

Tom Stoppard

Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.

Tom Stoppard

Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.

Tom Stoppard

The more doors there are for you to open, the better the play.

Tom Stoppard

It is better to be quotable than to be honest.

Tom Stoppard

I consider myself to be a very fortunate person and to have led a very fortunate life.

Tom Stoppard

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

Tom Stoppard

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.

Tom Stoppard

The text loses its virginity simply by being staged: it's no longer the abstract ideal version; it's an event.

Tom Stoppard

I'm good at being funny.

Tom Stoppard

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.

Tom Stoppard

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.

Tom Stoppard

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

Tom Stoppard

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

Tom Stoppard

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

Tom Stoppard

The whole notion of journalism being an institution whose fundamental purpose is to educate and inform and even, one might say, elevate, has altered under commercial pressure, perhaps, into a different kind of purpose, which is to divert and distract and entertain.

Tom Stoppard

My family was in Singapore when the Japanese War started. We were in Singapore at the time of Pearl Harbor, and by the beginning of 1942, the Japanese invasion of Burma and Singapore had started.

Tom Stoppard

There are certain sorts of jokes which have only to do with the substitution of the unexpected word in a familiar context. If you translated something into French and then had it translated back into English by somebody who didn't know the original, you'd lose what was funny.

Tom Stoppard

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

Tom Stoppard

You don't often get a proposal to do Tolstoy for a really interesting director - that's easy to say yes to.

Tom Stoppard

The truth of the matter is that I used to be much more - as it were - shy. Now I don't care!

Tom Stoppard

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

Tom Stoppard

I was so thrilled being a reporter, because it gave you the kind of access to people that you wouldn't ever get to meet.

Tom Stoppard

Honesty is seldom ingratiating and often discomfiting.

Tom Stoppard

Every exit is an entry somewhere else.

Tom Stoppard

I really just like to be at a desk.

Tom Stoppard

I want to support the whole idea of the humanities and teaching the humanities as being something that - even if it can't be quantitatively measured as other subjects - it's as fundamental to all education.

Tom Stoppard

I'm not a theoretician about playwriting, but I have a strong sense that plays have to be pitched - the scene, the line, the word - at the exact point where the audience has just the right amount of information. It's like Occam's razor.

Tom Stoppard

The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.

Tom Stoppard

Top 475 Quotes & Sayings by Tom Stoppard

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