Tom Stoppard Quotes:- Tom Stoppard (born 3 July 1937) is a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter.
Inspirational Tom Stoppard Quotes
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.
Tom Stoppard
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
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.
Tom Stoppard
From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.
Tom Stoppard
Good things, when short, are twice as good.
Tom Stoppard
My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.
Tom Stoppard
It is better, of course, to know useless things than to know nothing.
Tom Stoppard
Life is a gamble, at terrible odds – if it was a bet you wouldn’t take it.
Tom Stoppard
Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
Tom Stoppard
The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.
Tom Stoppard
Famous 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.
Tom Stoppard
A healthy attitude is contagious but, don’t wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.
Tom Stoppard
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.
Tom Stoppard
A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar – you pretend it’s not there.
Tom Stoppard
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
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.
Tom Stoppard
I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.
Tom Stoppard
Back in the East you can’t do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power.
Tom Stoppard
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.
Tom Stoppard
If enough things that are untrue are said about you, no one will know what really is true.
Tom Stoppard
Greatest Tom Stoppard Quotes
Fatherlessness didn’t strike me as being an event. It was a state of life.
Tom Stoppard
I’m so grateful to grab hold of something that wants to be a play. It doesn’t happen very often. I don’t have unwritten plays waiting for their turn.
Tom Stoppard
I take every possible side.
Tom Stoppard
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.
Tom Stoppard
You can’t but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it’s a narrative art form.
Tom Stoppard
The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy.
Tom Stoppard
I was so thrilled being a reporter because it gave you the kind of access to people that you wouldn’t ever get to meet.
Tom Stoppard
Best Tom Stoppard Quotes About Life
From as long as, literally as far back as I can remember I’ve liked puns, word jokes, I can literally recall looking at a comic at the age of six or seven and I remember what I enjoyed and what it was precisely and how the joke worked.
Tom Stoppard
I’ve seldom minded other people’s opinions, but the other side of that coin is that I’ve seldom been interested by them, um their opinions about me I mean.
Tom Stoppard
Well, I believe in the desirability of an optimal society.
Tom Stoppard
I think that the present is worth attention, one shouldn’t sacrifice it to future conceptions of, of this future or that future.
Tom Stoppard
If the audience is made to do not enough work, they resent it without knowing it. Too much and they get lost. There’s a perfect place to be found. And a perfect place that is different for every line of the play.
Tom Stoppard
I’m a conservative kind of person. I don’t think rightwing is quite the same thing. But I acknowledge my conservatism of temperament.
Tom Stoppard
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.
Tom Stoppard
As a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas. I have no illusions about that.
Tom Stoppard
For a long time, I managed to think two things simultaneously, that I am actually a good playwright, and that the next time I write a play I will be revealed as someone who is no good at all.
Tom Stoppard
Quotes on Tom Stoppard
I’m attracted to the past.
Tom Stoppard
I’m hopeless at looking into myself and trying to see how things are working and why.
Tom Stoppard
Possibly because I did start off as a journalist, my starting point has always been that you’ve got to keep an audience with you. Whatever you’re doing, you always want a script to be a page-turner. It’s very important never, ever, to feel above that.
Tom Stoppard
In the theater, there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramatics.
Tom Stoppard
I read for interest and enjoyment, and when I cease to enjoy it I stop.
Tom Stoppard
A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.
Tom Stoppard
I write for film in this case, television when I haven’t got a play, cooking.
Tom Stoppard
The 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.
Tom Stoppard
The idea of the state is or should be, a very limited, prescribed idea. The state looks after the defense of the realm, and other matters – raising revenue to pay for things which are for all of us, and so on. That idea has turned turtle now. The state isn’t any longer perceived as an institution which- exists to serve us.
Tom Stoppard
Top Tom Stoppard Quotes
I’m aware of my old plays and occasionally think about them, but I’m much more anxious about finding the next play.
Tom Stoppard
Writing a new play shouldn’t be seen as a mystery belonging to priesthood but as a challenge, a technical challenge, just to get into it.
Tom Stoppard
If I had been asked to write 1,200 words for a newspaper tomorrow, on any subject, I would just do it rather than leave a white hole in the page. And I think it’s a very healthy attitude to take to writing anything.
Tom Stoppard
‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ is important, but it says nothing about anything.
Tom Stoppard
‘Arcadia’ is obviously a play that’s got interesting things in it that are perhaps quite hard to grasp.
Tom Stoppard
You should not translate for more than two hours at a time. After that, you lose your edge, the language becomes clumsy, rigid.
Tom Stoppard
If an idea’s worth having once, it’s worth having twice.
Tom Stoppard
Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.
Tom Stoppard
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.
Tom Stoppard
You end up going to school plays quite a bit as a parent, there are a lot of kids who are doing the job as well as they can, but there’s always one or two who seem much more at home in the world of impersonation.
Tom Stoppard
