Quotes By Tom Stoppard

I'm offended by things and take pathetic little stands against them.

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

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 pace to be found. And a perfect place that is different for every line of the play.

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

Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.

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've got no interest in educating or instructing people.

I'm vaguely embarrassed by myself sometimes.

From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.

I never had any frustration about writing uncredited. I always felt that the satisfaction of doing it was in the doing of it, really, and getting recognised by the small number of people that know what you did.

I'm hopeless at looking into myself and trying to see how things are working and why.

The fact is that people are attracted to new work and by new work.

I take every possible side.

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.

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

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.

I don't think Stoppardian has a precise definition.

I consider myself to be a very fortunate person and to have led a very fortunate life.

I don't act, I don't direct, I don't design.

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.

It's better to be quotable than to be honest.

If enough things that are untrue are said about you, no one will know what really is true.

I'm a conservative kind of person. I don't think rightwing is quite the same thing. But I acknowledge my conservatism of temperament.

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.

The whole notion of journalism being an institution whose fundamental purpose is to educate and inform and even, one might say, elevate, has altered under commercial pressure, perhaps, into a different kind of purpose, which is to divert and distract and entertain.

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.

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

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.

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.

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