Tom Stoppard Quotes - Page 4

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Traitors hoist by their own petard?--or victims of the gods?--we shall never know!

I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.

'The Importance of Being Earnest' is important, but it says nothing about anything.

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

I like trying to create a spark through a collaboration between me and the audience.

Audiences know what to expect, and that is all that they are prepared to believe in.

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

He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.

I actually went to an Oasis concert. I thought they were a brilliant songwriting band.

I consider myself to be a very fortunate person and to have led a very fortunate life.

When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas chamber, he'd said it all.

I like plays where people talk a lot. Conversation is sustained. Argument is sustained.

There are many, many more small theater spaces than there were when I was starting out.

You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?

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

A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.

The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.

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

If enough things that are untrue are said about you, no one will know what really is true.

ROS: Why don't you go and have a look? GUIL: Pragmatism?! - is that all you have to offer?

I proudly tell people, 'I have no computer,' so as not to be ashamed of having no computer.

From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.

The truth of the matter is that I used to be much more - as it were - shy. Now I don't care!

I don't respond well to the Olympic noise, which is the noise of nationalistic triumphalism.

The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy.

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

One of the nice things about the world of filmmaking is that you make friends in the business.

It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

I seem to be failing in my intention to be as boring as I possibly can be for self-protection.

Personally, I read reviews because I'm interested by them, but they don't have utility for me.

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

An artist is the magician put among men to gratify - capriciously - their urge for immortality.

One doesn't want one's democracy to behave like a dictatorial or fascistic police. One doesn't.

Words are sacred. If you get the right ones in the right order you can nudge the world a little.

Everybody I know is writing plays twice a year. It's sort of making me feel I am not up to much.

Sometimes I watch a scene I've written, and occasionally I think, "Oh, for God's sake, shut up."

A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.

A publisher many years ago asked if I'd like to write a novel for £50. And I said, 'Absolutely.'

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

Directors sometimes have good ideas that I wished I'd had, not on rewriting but simply on staging.

When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.

I've never written an original piece for film; all the original things I've done are for the stage.

I don't really have a system or set of principles. It's kind of common sense mixed up with instinct.

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

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

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

People think there's a choice between smoking and immortality, but we've all got to die of something.

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

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

Theater is a recreation. It can be much more, but unless it's recreation, I don't see the point of it.

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