Tom Stoppard Quotes
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.
James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.
We've traveled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation.
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.
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.
A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.
You can't treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires.
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.
There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.
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.
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.
The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.
There is no one so radical as a man-servant whose freedom of the champagne bin has been interfered with.
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.
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.
I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.
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.
An artist is the magician put among men to gratify - capriciously - their urge for immortality.
I've never written an original piece for film; all the original things I've done are for the stage.
I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.
Sometimes I watch a scene I've written, and occasionally I think, "Oh, for God's sake, shut up."
Every age thinks it's the modern age, but this one really is. Electricity is going to change everything. Everything!
Rosencrantz: Shouldn't we be doing something--constructive? Guildenstern: What did you have in mind? ... A short, blunt human pyramid...?
A genuine love of learning is one of the two delinquencies which cause blindness and lead a young man to ruin.
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.
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.
