Top 215 Tom Stoppard Quotes

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

Other people’s lives come at us without a backstory most of the time. The present is like that.

One doesn’t want one’s democracy to behave like a dictatorial or fascistic police. One doesn’t.

Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you’re investigating a text.

If you don’t know what is being said, the rest of the actor‘s work is wasted.

Somebody who likes to do my plays is a good director for them.

I flinch when I see my name in the newspapers.

I am not somebody who meets a man or a woman somewhere and feels like that is an incredible character that I must write into a play.

I don’t respond well to the Olympic noise, which is the noise of nationalistic triumphalism.

One feels that the past stays the way you left it, whereas the present is in constant movement; it’s unstable all around you.

Even when the writing seems very frivolous, I’m puritanical. I don’t mean my subject matter. It’s that I’m almost pathologically incapable of leaving something when I’m not quite happy with it.

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 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.

Honesty is seldom ingratiating and often discomfiting.

It’s really hard to talk about writing, and I’m usually conscious if I’m misleading people or misleading the questioner, because the problem with writing is the next line.

Theatre probably originated without texts, but by the time we get to the classical Greek period, theatre has become text-based.

In the end, one has to feel lucky that things fell out O.K. I’ve felt that all the years I’ve been writing plays.

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

I wish I could remember how to write a play. I can’t remember how they happened.

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

The truth of the matter is that I used to be much more – as it were – shy. Now I don’t care!

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

I’m vaguely embarrassed by myself sometimes.

I’m attracted to the past.

A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar – you pretend it’s not there.

A ‘human right‘ is, by definition, timeless. It cannot adhere to some societies and not others, at some times and not at other times.

Like many people, I only knew of Ford Madox Ford through a book called ‘The Good Soldier,’ which is everybody‘s favorite Ford Madox Ford if they have one, but I came to read ‘Parade‘s End’ when it was suggested via Damien Timmer of Mammoth Screen.

All of my scripts are based on other people’s novels. Generally, I consider myself as one who writes for theatre. I do not see film work as a continuation of writing for theatre. It is more of an interruption of the writing process.

People think I’m very nice, you know. And I’m not as nice as they think.

Schepisi is the sort of director who could, would, and frequently did phone me whenever he came across a textual problem.

Nobody would be killed on the roads if the speed limit were 10 miles an hour.

Theater in New York is nearer to the street. In London, you have to go deep into the building, usually, to reach the place where theater happens. On Broadway, only the fire doors separate you from the sidewalk, and you’re lucky if the sound of a police car doesn’t rip the envelope twice a night.

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

I’m not one of those writers who insist they don’t read reviews and don’t care much about them. I do read them, and I do care about them, and they’re not always what you want them to be in an ideal world.

Everybody I know is writing plays twice a year. It’s sort of making me feel I am not up to much.

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 like trying to create a spark through a collaboration between me and the audience.

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

I am good at being shown something and counterpunching.

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

Chekhov understood that people are mysterious and can’t be reduced to what we nowadays call ‘motivation.’

Good things, when short, are twice as good.

I take every possible side.

I was an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values against which art could be measured. I didn’t trust my own subjective responses.

My desk faces the water, and I’m perfectly happy sitting there. I’m never lonely.

After all these years, I definitely associate having a pen in my hand with having an ashtray just out of eye line.

For me, human rights simply endorse a view of life and a set of moral values that are perfectly clear to an eight-year-old child. A child knows what is fair and isn’t fair, and justice derives from that knowledge.

In 2005, I got an email from Belarus Free Theatre. They were emailing playwrights in America and England announcing their existence and saying they would like support from us. I wrote back and asked if they wanted us to visit. They said, ‘Yes, we’d love that.’

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 think probably I’ve been influenced by Chekhov and Walt Disney, if you see what I mean.

I seem to be failing in my intention to be as boring as I possibly can be for self-protection.

Like many people, I only knew of Ford Madox Ford through a book called ‘The Good Soldier,’ which is everybody‘s favorite Ford Madox Ford if they have one, but I came to read ‘Parade‘s End’ when it was suggested via Damien Timmer of Mammoth Screen.

That I have the right to express myself freely at all times in all circumstances entails the idea that free speech is a ‘basic human right’ possessed by each individual, and, as such, trumps the interests of the society or group, including my neighbour.

I like the notion of theater as recreational.

It’s so great in the theater when everyone catches up on the truth.

I think I give the impression of being a romantic, and I think inside I’m quite severe. But some might say they had the opposite impression of me.

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.

Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.

I think I’m a difficult conventional writer.

People have quite a simple idea about ‘Anna Karenina.’ They feel that the novel is entirely about a young married woman who falls in love with a cavalry officer and leaves her husband after much agony, and pays the price for that.

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

The thing about talking about human rights is that when one bears in mind the sharp end of it, one does not want to worry too much about semantics.

Although I don’t examine myself in this respect, I would say, off the top of my head, that I’ve come to acknowledge my Czechness more as I get older.

Success is a sort of metaphysical experience. I live exactly as I did before – only on a slightly bigger scale. Naturally, I won’t be corrupted. I’ll sit there in my Rolls, uncorrupted, and tell my chauffeur, uncorruptedly, where to go.

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.

Life in a box is better than no life at all… I expect.

It is better to be quotable than to be honest.

What Tolstoy is on about is that carnal love is not a good idea.

I want to support the whole idea of the humanities and teaching the humanities as being something that – even if it can’t be quantitatively measured as other subjects – it’s as fundamental to all education.

I don’t want to come over as some boringly self-deprecating person. But I don’t see myself as a groundbreaking writer in the way plays are structured.

When you try to grasp the way the Western world is going, you see that we are on a ratchet towards a surveillance state, which is coming to include the whole population in its surveillance. This is our reward for accepting the restraints on the way we live now.

The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.

If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music and of aviation.

When I was a reporter in Bristol, which I was between the years 1954 and 1960, the newspaper would get tickets for whoever showed up to play a gig at the big hall down the road, so I saw some wonderful people. The Everly Brothers, for example.

I like pop music. I consider rock ‘n’ roll to be a branch of pop music.

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.

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’m a playwright who gets involved in movies when I’m not writing a play.

I’m very unhappy about my entire life if my writing is going wrong.

I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.

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

Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.

My intention still is to write a play to commemorate, possibly rather skeptically, the 50th anniversary of the Russian revolution. I started it at the beginning of 1966, but confronted with the enormous importance and reality of that revolution, I absolutely boggle. I don’t know what to do about it.

The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent – that rights are inherent – is unintelligible in a Darwinian world.

I’m very garrulous, but I don’t say anything.

I’m not interested in clothes; I just like them.

The notion that the ‘leader‘ has the right to ask huge sacrifices of your generation for a notional future paradise – if you’d be good enough to lie down under the wheels of the juggernaut – that sentimental and self-aggrandising rationalisation for brute force and cowardice I felt from adolescence was wrong.

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

My family was in Singapore when the Japanese War started. We were in Singapore at the time of Pearl Harbor, and by the beginning of 1942, the Japanese invasion of Burma and Singapore had started.

If you don’t know what is being said, the rest of the actor‘s work is wasted.

All your life, you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.

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

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

Why should I write a play? I don’t have to write a play, do I? But somehow, I think that’s what I’m here for, so I’d better do it.

Writing a new play shouldn’t be seen as a mystery belonging to a priesthood, but as a challenge, a technical challenge, just to get into it.

For me, the reputation for teaching language in general, and East European languages most particularly, gave Glasgow University, and by reflection the country, a distinction.

When Auden said his poetry didn’t save one Jew from the gas chamber, he’d said it all.

I really just like to be at a desk.

One of the nice things about the world of filmmaking is that you make friends in the business. Sometimes directors feel a script needs something, but they’re not sure what it is, so they show it to a friend; if the friend is a writer, he ends up kicking around with that script for a while.

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.

To be 64 is appalling, so what does it matter being 65?

My intention still is to write a play to commemorate, possibly rather skeptically, the 50th anniversary of the Russian revolution. I started it at the beginning of 1966, but confronted with the enormous importance and reality of that revolution, I absolutely boggle. I don’t know what to do about it.

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

I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven‘t got a play cooking.

In my mind, I always knew what my father looked like.

Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.

I think I’m a difficult conventional writer.

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

You can’t go around chasing your own plays and showing up every time somebody does one somewhere. You just cross your fingers and hope that they’re OK.

There are certain sorts of jokes which have only to do with the substitution of the unexpected word in a familiar context. If you translated something into French and then had it translated back into English by somebody who didn’t know the original, you’d lose what was funny.

If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.

Love is – OK, it’s 20 things, but it isn’t 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.

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.

I loved the Beatles when they turned up, and the Stones when they turned up, and never really stopped liking them.

The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.

The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.

You are the plays you write. How on earth could you write them otherwise? They’re projections of your own predilections.

I have two garden parties a year to avoid going out to dinner.

My brain cells are dying in their trillions.

It takes a lot of effort to be vibrant.

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 dramaticness.

It is no light matter to put in jeopardy a single life when it is the very singularity of each life which underpins the idea of a just society.

I proudly tell people, ‘I have no computer,’ so as not to be ashamed of having no computer.

The days of the digital watch are numbered.

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

When I was 20, the idea of having a play on anywhere was just beyond my dreams.

Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.

The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy.

Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.

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.

One senses that all the Bolsheviks, even those who ended up as cold-blooded autocrats, had been on a journey from idealism to something else, and didn’t notice – to mix periods – when the Rubicon was crossed.

‘Shakespeare in Love’ was a particularly happy film.

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

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.

Despite the digital age, there is a very large number of venues and spaces that are looking for plays, and many of them are looking for new plays.

Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.

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.

Love is – OK, it’s 20 things, but it isn’t 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.

I think of myself as a theater animal instead of an intellectual animal.

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

Every exit is an entry somewhere else.

I feel overestimated.

I like plays where people talk a lot. Conversation is sustained. Argument is sustained.

Obviously, you would give your life for your children, or give them the last biscuit on the plate. But to me, the trick in life is to take that sense of generosity between kin, make it apply to the extended family and to your neighbour, your village and beyond.

With plays that require any kind of reading program, I’m reading for a couple of years before using the material.

For me, human rights simply endorse a view of life and a set of moral values that are perfectly clear to an eight-year-old child. A child knows what is fair and isn’t fair, and justice derives from that knowledge.

In January 1962, when I was the author of one and a half unperformed plays, I attended a student production of ‘The Birthday Party‘ at the Victoria Rooms in Bristol. Just before it began, I realised that Harold Pinter was sitting in front of me.

If I hadn’t left Czechoslovakia, I would have been dead.

The way ‘star‘ used to be reserved for a small number of people, and when the star category became so vast, they came up with ‘superstar,’ and then they came up with ‘megastar.’

A writer doesn’t really have much of a function on a movie set.

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.

Like most writers, I just create because I have a story to tell, really.

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.

Every exit is an entry somewhere else.

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.

If I see an actor in a role that is really terrifying, no matter how many times I meet him socially, I’m still frightened of him. I think he’s going to hit me.

Life in a box is better than no life at all… I expect.

One senses that all the Bolsheviks, even those who ended up as cold-blooded autocrats, had been on a journey from idealism to something else, and didn’t notice – to mix periods – when the Rubicon was crossed.

I went to an English school and was brought up in English. So I don’t feel Czech.

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

I’m not like some other writers: I have no actual urgent need or desire to add to what’s written. You write it; if you’re lucky, it’s performed, and that’s the end of the whole thing.

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.

When ‘The Dark Side of the Moon‘ was a new album in 1973, a friend of mine walked into my room where I was working with a copy in his hand and said, ‘You really have to do a play about this album.’

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

I don’t know that I want to share all my most intimate secrets.

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 don’t believe that we evolved moral psychology; it just doesn’t seem plausible to me as a biological phenomenon.

I always loved rock ‘n’ roll.

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.

I don’t feel like a Londoner.

I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.

It’s very common for people to recommend something to me because they’re going on what I’ve already written, when, what really is the case, is that you want to write about something you haven’t written about, in ways that you haven’t done before.

I have two garden parties a year to avoid going out to dinner.

My scripts are possibly too talkative. Sometimes I watch a scene I’ve written, and occasionally I think, ‘Oh, for God‘s sake, shut up.’

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

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

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

If an idea’s worth having once, it’s worth having twice.

I am as miserable as anyone – sometimes.

Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.

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

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

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

You should not translate for more than two hours at a time. After that, you lose your edge, the language becomes clumsy, rigid.

I adopted England as least as much as England adopted me.

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

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.

The notion that the ‘leader‘ has the right to ask huge sacrifices of your generation for a notional future paradise – if you’d be good enough to lie down under the wheels of the juggernaut – that sentimental and self-aggrandising rationalisation for brute force and cowardice I felt from adolescence was wrong.

Lou Reed was a hero because he was an anti-hero.

The idea that public safety, the safety of the innocent, is an absolute which trumps every other consideration, is tacitly abandoned in the way we live.

I have a spasm of envy for the person that was killed by a falling bookcase, as long as it doesn’t happen prematurely.

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

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

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.

The idea that anybody might be allowed to use their common sense when clearly no harm is being done is part of history now.

I burn with no causes.

When I was 20, in 1957, and maybe you would say I was old enough to know better, but nevertheless, I was completely nuts about Buddy Holly. And I loved pop bands that had absolutely no intellectual pretensions whatsoever. I loved the Monkees.

I don’t find it easy to think of good stuff to write about.

My father was a doctor in Moravia, in the south of the country. There were a number of Jewish doctors in the hospital there, and at a certain point – almost too late, really, but in time – they were all sent overseas by their employer.

I’m not that taken with Freudian perspectives. They seem to be overcomplicated.

One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn’t; translations seem to be of their time.

When I was in my teens, I was very, very keen on being the author of a book. What the book was was secondary. I wanted it to be in hardback. I didn’t care how thick or thin it was, and I didn’t actually care what it was about.

A free press needs to be a respected press.

Lou Reed was a hero because he was an anti-hero.

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

I can be affectionate about a lot of things without watching them.

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

The days of the digital watch are numbered.

When you write, it’s making a certain kind of music in your head. There’s a rhythm to it, a pulse, and on the whole, I’m writing to that drum rather than the psychological process.

The text loses its virginity simply by being staged: it’s no longer the abstract ideal version; it’s an event.

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.

I barely remembered my father; I’m confused between genuine memory and the few photographs that survived.

There are too many things I find it difficult to say ‘no’ to.

The whole excitement for writing anything is quite intense. And for a day or two, you think you’ve done everything extremely well. The problems start on the third day, and continues for the rest of your life.

Like almost everything else from the West, the Romantic Revolution arrived late in Russia.