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Tom Stoppard

104 quotes

“It seems pointless to be quoted if one isn't going to be quotable … it's better to be quotable than honest.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) first seen 1973 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Janet Watts in The Guardian (21 March 1973)
“Most of the propositions I’m interested in have been kidnapped and dressed up by academic philosophy, but they are in fact the kind of proposition which would occur to any intelligent person in his bath. They're not "academic" questions — they're simply questions which have been given academic status … Philosophy can be reduced to a small number of questions which can be battered about most bars most nights.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As recorded by American theatre critic Mel Gussow in a taped interview (April 1974); at 18m 10s
“I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Tom Stoppard," profile by Kenneth Tynan, The New Yorker (19 December 1977)
“I began my talk by saying that I had not written my plays for purposes of discussion. At once, I felt a ripple of panic run through the hall. I suddenly realised why. To everyone present, discussion was the whole point of drama. That was why the faculty had been endowed — that was why all those buildings had been put up! I had undermined the entire reason for their existence.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Tom Stoppard," profile by Kenneth Tynan, The New Yorker (19 December 1977)
“I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview, The Guardian [London] (18 March 1988)
“I am relieved. At least we can still count on self interest as a predictable factor.…I suppose it’s the last to go.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My name is Guildenstern, and this is Rosencrantz. confers briefly with him. (Without embarrassment.) I’m sorry—his name’s Guildenstern, and I’m Rosencrantz.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We do on stage the 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.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Maidens aspiring to godheads— And vice versa—”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We’re more of the blood, love and rhetoric school. Well, I’ll leave the choice to you, if there is anything to choose between them. They’re hardly divisible, sir—well, I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I can’t do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory—they’re all blood, you see.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(an anguished cry): Consistency is all I ask! (low, wry rhetoric): Give us this day our daily mask.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Words, words. They’re all we have to go on.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What a fine persecution—to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Half of what he said meant something else, and the other half didn’t mean anything at all.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(lost): There we were—demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance—and every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. (He rounds on them.) Don’t you see?! We’re actors—we’re the opposite of people!”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We’re still finding our feet. I should concentrate on not losing your heads.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think I have it. A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself. Or just as mad. Or just as mad. And he does both. So there you are. Stark raving sane.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You’d have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking—Well, at least I’m not dead!”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it going to end?”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one, a moment, in childhood, when it first occurred to you that you don’t go on for ever. It must have been shattering—stamped into one’s memory. And yet I can’t remember it. It never occurred to me at all. What does one make of that? We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it, before we know that there are words, out we come, bloodied and squalling with the knowledge that for all the compasses in the world, there’s only one direction, and time is its only measure.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Death followed by eternity…the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If I might make a suggestion—shut up and sit down. Stop being perverse.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go when things have got about as bad as they reasonably get.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The bad end unhappily; the good, unluckily. That is what tragedy means.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I want a good story, with a beginning, middle and end.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I extract significance from melodrama, a significance which it does not in fact contain; but occasionally, from out of this matter, there escapes a thin beam of light that, seen at the right angle, can crack the shell of mortality.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn’t death! (More quietly.) You scream and choke and sink to your knees but it doesn’t bring death home to anyone—it doesn’t catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says—“One day you are going to die.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Dark, isn’t it? Not for night.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All I ask is our common due! For those in peril on the sea.… Give us this day our daily cue.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We act on scraps of information…sifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Obscure promises balanced by vague threats.…”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don’t believe in it anyway. What? England. Just a conspiracy of cartographers, you mean?”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat? No, no, no…Death is…not. Death isn’t. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can’t not-be on a boat. I’ve frequently not been on boats. No, no, no—what you’ve been is not on boats.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life is a gamble, at terrible odds—if it was a bet you wouldn’t take it.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Spontaneity and whim are the order of the day. Other wheels are turning but they are not our concern. We can breathe. We can relax. We can do what we like and say what we like to whomever we like, without restriction. Within limits, of course. Certainly within limits.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(broken): We’ve traveled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Be happy—if you’re not even happy, what’s so good about surviving?”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So there is an end to that—it’s commonplace: light goes with life, and in the winter of your years the dark comes early.…”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There must have been a time, at the beginning, when we could have said—no. But somehow we missed it. (He looks round and sees he is alone.) Rosen—? Guil—? He gathers himself. Well, we’ll know better next time.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering; the capacity for self-indulgence changes hands.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Since we cannot hope for order let us withdraw with style from the chaos.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When someone disagrees with you on a moral point you assume that he is one step behind in his thinking, and he assumes that he has gone one step ahead. But I take both parts, O'Hara, leapfrogging myself along the great moral issues, refuting myself and rebutting the refutation towards a truth that must be the compound of two opposite half-truths. And you never reach it because there is always something more to say.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I agree with everything you say, but I would attack to the death your right to say it.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) first seen 1931 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: This is a reference to a quote of Rudyard Kipling, "Power without responsibility — the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages," which became widely known after being quoted by prime minister Stanley Baldwin in a …
“Donner: Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is presumably a calendar date — a moment — when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, secretly, the noes had it.”
Tom Stoppard (1937–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source