Ed Stoppard Quotes
The truth is always a compound of two half- truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say.
One of the nice things about the world of filmmaking is that you make friends in the business.
We've traveled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation.
James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.
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.
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.
I'm the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal and rebut the refutation. Endlessly.
When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.
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.
You can't treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires.
He's never known anything like it! But then, he has never known anything to write home about, so this is nothing to write home about.
A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.
I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.
There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.
We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.
I've never written an original piece for film; all the original things I've done are for the stage.
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.
The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.
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.
I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.
An artist is the magician put among men to gratify - capriciously - their urge for immortality.
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.
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.
Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins.
I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.
Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God's crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can't think of anything more trivial than quarks, quasars, big bangs and black holes.
Rosencrantz: Shouldn't we be doing something--constructive? Guildenstern: What did you have in mind? ... A short, blunt human pyramid...?
There is no one so radical as a man-servant whose freedom of the champagne bin has been interfered with.
Every age thinks it's the modern age, but this one really is. Electricity is going to change everything. Everything!
A genuine love of learning is one of the two delinquencies which cause blindness and lead a young man to ruin.
