Tom Stoppard Quotes

154 Sourced Quotes

I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.

Tom Stoppard
Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead.

Tom Stoppard
Let me get it straight. Your father was king. You were his only son. Your father dies. You are of age. Your uncle becomes king." "Yes." "Unorthodox.

Tom Stoppard
Oh, you're going to zap me with penicillin and pesticides. Spare me that and I'll spare you the bomb and aerosols. But don't confuse progress with perfectibility. A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need. There's no rush for Isaac Newton. We were quite happy with Aristotle's cosmos. Personally, I preferred it. Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God's crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can't think of anything more trivial than the speed of light. Quarks, quasars - big bangs, black holes - who gives a shit? How did you people con us out of all that status? All that money?

Tom Stoppard
You can persuade a man to believe almost anything provided he is clever enough, but it is much more difficult to persuade someone less clever.

Tom Stoppard
When I was at school, on certain afternoons we all had to do what was called Labour — weeding, sweeping, sawing logs for the boiler-room, that sort of thing; but if you had a chit from Matron you were let off to spend the afternoon messing about in the Art Room. Labour or Art. And you've got a chit for life? Where did you get it? What is an artist? For every thousand people there's nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who's the artist.

Tom Stoppard
I'm showing an interest in your work. I thought you liked me showing an interest in your work. My showing. Save the gerund and screw the whale.

Tom Stoppard
Alexander: I myself was educated in Italy. My doctorate in philosophy is from the University of Padua.
Renne: Really? Philosophy?
Alexander: My dissertation was on worms.
Renne: Worms the philosopher?
Alexander: No, just worms.
Renne: Ah, the philosophy of worms.
Alexander: Not at all. Worms have no philosophy, as far as is known.

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

Tom Stoppard
The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.

Tom Stoppard
I learned three things in Zurich during the war. I wrote them down. Firstly, you're either a revolutionary or you're not, and if you're not you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can't be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary. … I forget the third thing.

Tom Stoppard
War is capitalism with the gloves off and many who go to war know it but they go to war because they don't want to be a hero. It takes courage to sit down and be counted.

Tom Stoppard
Ros: Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?

Tom Stoppard
I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I can't do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory—they're all blood, you see.

Tom Stoppard
Their coarseness is the sinew of some kind of brute confidence which is the reason England is home to every shade of political exile. They don't give asylum out of respect for asylum-seekers, but out of respect for themselves. They invented personal liberty, and they know it, and they did it without having any theories about it. They value liberty because it's liberty.

Tom Stoppard
I agree with everything you say, but I would attack to the death your right to say it.

Tom Stoppard
Since we cannot hope for order let us withdraw with style from the chaos.

Tom Stoppard
Bakunin: Act first! The ideas will follow, and if not — well, it's progress

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

Tom Stoppard
Bakunin: Left to themselves people are noble, generous, uncorrupted, they'd create a completely new kind of society if only people weren't so blind, stupid and selfish.
Herzen: Is that the same people or different people?
Bakunin: The same people.

Tom Stoppard
I had no idea Gwendolen knew any foreign languages, and I am not sure that I approve. It's the sort of thing that can only broaden a girl's mind.

Tom Stoppard
The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody.

Tom Stoppard
There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said no. But somehow we missed it.

Tom Stoppard
It's no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst.

Tom Stoppard
Bennett seems to be showing alarming signs of irony. I have always found that irony among the lower orders is the first sign of an awakening social consciousness. It remains to be seen whether it will grow into an armed seizure of the means of production, distribution and exchange, or spend itself in liberal journalism.

Tom Stoppard
I don't think I can be expected to take seriously any game which takes less than three days to reach its conclusion.
A cricket enthusiast on baseball

Tom Stoppard
Turgenev: The names for things don't come first. Words stagger after, hopelessly trying to become the sensation.

Tom Stoppard
An essentially private man [James Joyce] who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.

Tom Stoppard
The kind of person who embarks on an endless leap-frog down to the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute it, refute the rebuttal and rebut the refutation. Endlessly.
On himself

Tom Stoppard
Tzara: Causality is no longer fashionable owing to the war.
Carr: How illogical, since the war itself had causes. I forget what they were, but it was all in the papers at the time. Something about brave little Belgium, wasn't it?
Tzara: Was it? I thought it was Serbia...
Carr: Brave little Serbia...? No, I don't think so. The newspapers would never have risked calling the British public to arms without a proper regard for succinct alliteration.

Tom Stoppard