Top 202 Tom Stoppard Quotes

One always likes to think that other countries are not like one’s own.

Theatre probably originated without texts, but by the time we get to the classical Greek period, theatre has become text-based.

My intention still is to write a play to commemorate, possibly rather skeptically, the 50th anniversary of the Russian revolution. I started it at the beginning of 1966, but confronted with the enormous importance and reality of that revolution, I absolutely boggle. I don’t know what to do about it.

I burn with no causes.

It is better to be quotable than to be honest.

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

What Tolstoy is on about is that carnal love is not a good idea.

It is easily and often overlooked that when Thomas Jefferson asserted that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were inalienable human rights, he did so on the ground that they had been endowed by God, our Creator.

It’s really hard to talk about writing, and I’m usually conscious if I’m misleading people or misleading the questioner, because the problem with writing is the next line.

Lou Reed was a hero because he was an anti-hero.

Like almost everything else from the West, the Romantic Revolution arrived late in Russia.

If I had been asked to write 1,200 words for a newspaper tomorrow, on any subject, I would just do it rather than leave a white hole in the page. And I think it’s a very healthy attitude to take to writing anything.

Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you’re investigating a text.

I don’t feel that I belong anywhere. Or rather, if there’s a place I belong, I don’t feel I’m there.

Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.

I think probably I’ve been influenced by Chekhov and Walt Disney, if you see what I mean.

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

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

When ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ was a new album in 1973, a friend of mine walked into my room where I was working with a copy in his hand and said, ‘You really have to do a play about this album.’

I’m good at being funny.

I don’t want to come over as some boringly self-deprecating person. But I don’t see myself as a groundbreaking writer in the way plays are structured.

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.

Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.

The whole excitement for writing anything is quite intense. And for a day or two, you think you’ve done everything extremely well. The problems start on the third day, and continues for the rest of your life.

I think I give the impression of being a romantic, and I think inside I’m quite severe. But some might say they had the opposite impression of me.

I write scenes – often quite long scenes – mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.

When I was younger, I could do something useful just by being free for half a day, but now I need five days to get the world I’ve left out of my head and ten days or a fortnight not talking to anyone to hold what I need to hold inside my head.

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.

I never had any frustration about writing uncredited. I always felt that the satisfaction of doing it was in the doing of it, really, and getting recognised by the small number of people that know what you did.

I’m not interested in clothes; I just like them.

It was a different planet in 1967, the Broadway theatre. It had a little ashtray clamped to the back of every seat and the author got 10% of the gross.

If an idea’s worth having once, it’s worth having twice.

I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.

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.

I’m aware of my old plays and occasionally think about them, but I’m much more anxious about finding the next play.

I feel overestimated.

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.

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.

Corporeal death is not the whole story.

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

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

I don’t draw on my inner life in my work.

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

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.

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.

If you let the plot be determined by what you feel is in the character’s mind at that point, it may not turn out to be a very good play, but at least it will be a play where people are behaving in a kind of truthful way.

My desk faces the water, and I’m perfectly happy sitting there. I’m never lonely.

I am aware, as everybody has to be, that there’s more competition for one’s attention nowadays.

Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.

When you try to grasp the way the Western world is going, you see that we are on a ratchet towards a surveillance state, which is coming to include the whole population in its surveillance. This is our reward for accepting the restraints on the way we live now.

For me, human rights simply endorse a view of life and a set of moral values that are perfectly clear to an eight-year-old child. A child knows what is fair and isn’t fair, and justice derives from that knowledge.

The thing that happens remarkably often is that the people who are writing a dissertation believe they need to speak to me in order to do their dissertation. They need to interview me.

Possibly because I did start off as a journalist, my starting point has always been that you’ve got to keep an audience with you. Whatever you’re doing, you always want a script to be a page-turner. It’s very important never, ever, to feel above that.

I think of myself as a theater animal instead of an intellectual animal.

From as long as, literally as far back as I can remember I’ve liked puns, word jokes, I can literally recall looking at a comic at the age of six or seven and I remember what I enjoyed and what it was precisely and how the joke worked.

I don’t find it easy to think of good stuff to write about.

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 not that taken with Freudian perspectives. They seem to be overcomplicated.

You should not translate for more than two hours at a time. After that, you lose your edge, the language becomes clumsy, rigid.

I have about a dozen cassettes lying about which I use in random order. Very often, I pick up a cassette to dictate a letter, and I find my voice coming back at me with the lines of plays three years old.

If you don’t know what is being said, the rest of the actor’s work is wasted.

One senses that all the Bolsheviks, even those who ended up as cold-blooded autocrats, had been on a journey from idealism to something else, and didn’t notice – to mix periods – when the Rubicon was crossed.

You are the plays you write. How on earth could you write them otherwise? They’re projections of your own predilections.

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

Nobody would be killed on the roads if the speed limit were 10 miles an hour.

I wanted to be in the theater. It is simply the way I felt.

I don’t think falling in love in Slovakia is much different from falling in love in Tunbridge Wells.

The thing about talking about human rights is that when one bears in mind the sharp end of it, one does not want to worry too much about semantics.

Theater is still a medium which attracts young writers. You’d think that it would be all over by now, with television and film. But it’s not.

The idea that anybody might be allowed to use their common sense when clearly no harm is being done is part of history now.

I don’t feel like a Londoner.

I don’t believe there is something called ‘film’ and something called ‘theater,’ and that words belong in the theater. Some rather bad films have few words in them; some good films have a lot of words in them.

From as long as, literally as far back as I can remember I’ve liked puns, word jokes, I can literally recall looking at a comic at the age of six or seven and I remember what I enjoyed and what it was precisely and how the joke worked.