Quotes By Tom Stoppard

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

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

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.

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

I don't keep a diary and I throw away nearly all the paper I might have kept. I don't keep an archive. There's something worrying about my make-up that I try to leave no trace of myself apart from my plays.

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.

Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?

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

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.

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

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.

It is better to be quotable than to be honest.

Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.

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.

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.

I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven't got a play cooking.

James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.

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.

I was delighted to not go to university. I couldn't wait to be out of education.

Every exit is an entry somewhere else.

I feel overestimated.

I'm a very boring person.

I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

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.

I burn with no causes.

Good things, when short, are twice as good.

Life is a gamble, at terrible odds - if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.

I think that the present is worth attention, one shouldn't sacrifice it to future conceptions of, of this future or that future.

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.

Fatherlessness didn't strike me as being an event. It was a state of life.