Quotes By Tom Stoppard

It is better to be quotable than to be honest.

Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.

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

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.

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.

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.

Every exit is an entry somewhere else.

I feel overestimated.

I'm a very boring person.

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.

Good things, when short, are twice as good.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

The whole philosophy of modern times is to dissolve distinctions between individuals and deal with them as large collections of people. It's essentially self-interested on the part of authority.

The days of the digital watch are numbered.

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.

I can't remember what my first script was.

Get me inside any boardroom and I'll get any decision I want.

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

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

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.

Any revival in which I am involved is liable to change.

I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.