A Quote by Mel Gussow
More than any other contemporary British playwright, Tom Stoppard populates his plays -- from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to The Invention of Love (his portrait of the poet and scholar A. E. Housman) -- with characters from life and literature. But one cannot always tell the difference between those who are real and those who are imaginary.
Quote Topics
Quote Author
Related Quotes
Tom Stoppard, the English-speaking world's brainiest playwright, thinks that British audiences have grown too dumb to understand his plays.
Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway. Guildenstern: What? Rosencrantz: England. Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?
In the life of any actor or actress, there is inevitably a time when they will be eligible to act in a Tom Stoppard play. He has written a lot, and they are revived often, and there are so many characters of different ages that it was more likely I'd end up in something of his than that I wouldn't.
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.
I was at a dinner party many years ago,sitting along from Tom Stoppard, who in those days smoked not just between courses,but between mouthfuls. An American woman watched in disbelief. "And you so intelligent!" "Excuse me?" said tom "Knowing those things are going to kill you" she said "and still you do it." "How differently I might behave" Tom said, "if immortality were an option
More than any other poet, Whitman is what we make him; more than any other poet, his greatest value is in what he suggests and implies rather than in what he portrays, and more than any other poet must he wait to be understood by the growth of the taste of himself.
Shakespeare might have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the white streets of London, or seen the serving-men of rival houses bite their thumbs at each other in the open square; but Hamlet came out of his soul, and Romeo out of his passion.
In those days I learned that nothing is more frightening than a hero who lives to tell his story, to tell what all those who fell at his side will never be able to tell.
The acting bug first bit when I went to see 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead' at the Old Vic.
Figures cannot calculate the amount collected by those public and private robbers: it is more than would liberate every slave in the United States; it would pay the British debt! They say, We do not force people to give. I see no difference between forcing a man out of his money, at the mouth of a pistol, and forcing it from by trick and cunning; the crime is the same.
What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those of other things, are his history. These are his life, and they are not written. Everyday would make a whole book of 80,000 words -- 365 books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man -- the biography of the man himself cannot be written.
The difference between someone who is struggling and someone who has a fabulous life comes down to one thing -- love. Those who have a great life imagine what they love and want, and they feel the love of what's they're imagining more than other people.
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.
The difference between those who fail to achieve their goals in life and those who succeed is the difference between those who cannot put themselves in a supportive state and those who can consistently put themselves in a state that supports them in their achievements.
In comparing these two writers, he [Samuel Johnson] used this expression: "that there was as great a difference between them as between a man who knew how a watch was made, and a man who could tell the hour by looking on the dial-plate." This was a short and a figurative statement of his distinction between drawing characters of nature and characters only of manners, but I cannot help being of opinion, that the neat watches of Fielding are as well constructed as the large clocks of Richardson, and that his dial plates are brighter.
...those experiments be not only esteemed which have an immediate and present use, but those principally which are of most universal consequence for invention of other experiments, and those which give more light to the invention of causes; for the invention of the mariner's needle, which giveth the direction, is of no less benefit for navigation than the invention of the sails, which give the motion.
Related Authors
Andrea Dworkin Quotes
American
Critic
bell hooks Quotes
American
Critic
Charles Lamb Quotes
English
Critic
Charlie Brooker Quotes
English
Critic
Chuck Klosterman Quotes
American
Critic
Elvis Mitchell Quotes
American
Critic
Henry Giroux Quotes
American
Critic
Henry Louis Gates Quotes
American
Critic
Howard Rheingold Quotes
American
Critic
Jerry Saltz Quotes
American
Critic
Kimberly Guilfoyle Quotes
American
Critic
Roger Ebert Quotes
American
Critic
Roland Barthes Quotes
French
Critic
Terry Eagleton Quotes
English
Critic
Walter Benjamin Quotes
German
Critic
William Hazlitt Quotes
English
Critic