Quotes By Tom Stoppard

The days of the digital watch are numbered.

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

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.

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.

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

As a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas. I have no illusions about that.

Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society.

I write out of my intellectual experience.

The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.

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

I'm attracted to the past.

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

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

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

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

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

My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.

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.