Quotes By 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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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'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.

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

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

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

It is better to be quotable than to be honest.

Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.

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.

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.

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

Every exit is an entry somewhere else.

I feel overestimated.

I'm a very boring person.

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

Good things, when short, are twice as good.

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 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.