Tom Stoppard Quotes

Every exit is an entry somewhere else.

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.

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

It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.

A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.

To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.

If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.

Give us this day our daily mask.

It's no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst.

Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.

Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.

It would have been nice to have had unicorns.

The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody.

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.

When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?

Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

It is better to be quotable than to be honest.

Maybe Napoleon was wrong when he said we were a nation of shopkeepers... Today England looked like a nation of goalkeepers.

My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.

I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.

My life feels, week to week, incomplete to the level of being pointless if I am not in preparation for the next play or, ideally, into it.

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. but there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.

It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.

I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.

Information is light. Information in itself, about anything, is light.

The tragedy of journalism is that these are people doing their best work.

Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.

Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.

Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over... Death is not anything... death is not... It's the absence of presence, nothing more... the endless time of never coming back... a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes not sound.

The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.

Obviously, you would give your life for your children, or give them the last biscuit on the plate. But to me, the trick in life is to take that sense of generosity between kin, make it apply to the extended family and to your neighbour, your village and beyond.

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

When I think of how things could have turned out, I feel as if I've dodged, not just bullets, but 6mm shells.

If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that. But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.

We give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain.

I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.

It's the wanting to know that makes us matter.

It takes character to withstand the rigours of indolence.

I read for interest and enjoyment, and when I cease to enjoy it I stop.

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

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.

I don't think I can be expected to take seriously any game which takes less than three days to reach its conclusion.

We're actors. We're the opposite of people.

Biography is the mesh through which real life escapes.

I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus.

It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing.