Tom Stoppard Quotes

Life in a box is better than no life at all... I expect.

There is no one so radical as a man-servant whose freedom of the champagne bin has been interfered with.

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.

Save the gerund and screw the whale.

What did you have in mind? A short, blunt human pyramid?

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

For all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.

Uncertainty is the normal state.

There's something scary about stupidity made coherent.

Your opinions are your symptoms.

Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway. Guildenstern: What? Rosencrantz: England. Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?

The results of the divorce between truth and human beings can be most graphically observed in politics.

...reality, the name we give to the common experience.

The names for things don't come first. Words stagger after, hopelessly trying to become the sensation.

I doubt that art needed Ruskin any more than a moving train needs one of its passengers to shove it.

A play that works well and is done quite a lot - I've never done the math - but it's probably more remunerative than a movie.

Sometimes directors feel a script needs something, but they're not sure what it is, so they show it to a friend; if the friend is a writer, he ends up kicking around with that script for a while.

You are an over-excited little man, with a need for self-expression far beyond the scope of your natural gifts. This is not discreditable. Neither does it make you an artist.

the natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. strangely enough it all works out in the end... it's a mystery.

We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now.

If rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!

The days of the digitals are numbered. The metaphor is built into them like a self-destruct mechanism.

Well, we'll know better next time.

Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef.

Since we cannot hope for order, let us withdraw with style from the chaos.

Fantasy flows in where fact leaves a vacuum.

A circle is the longest distance to same point.

We drift down time, clutching at straws. But what good's a brick to a drowning man?

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.

And for the last three minutes on the wind of a windless day I have heard the sound of drums and flute.

The fact is that people are attracted to new work and by new work.

Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.

I take every possible side.

Of all forms of fiction, autobiography is the most gratuitous.

War is capitalism with the gloves off.

You can persuade a man to believe almost anything provided he is clever enough, but it is much more difficult to persuade someone less clever.

It takes a lot of effort to be vibrant.

Act first! The ideas will follow, and if not - well, it's progress

War is capitalism with the gloves off and many who go to war know it but they go to war because they don't want to be a hero.

No problem is insoluble, given a big enough plastic bag.

No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.

I will take his secret to the grave, telling people I meet on the way.

I feel overestimated.

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

can only write about what bites you.

The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it's trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren't supposed to be in that part of the plan.

You think human nature is a beast, that it must be put in a cage. But it's the cage that makes the animal bad.

I should have the courage of my lack of convictions.

Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light.