Quotes By Tom Stoppard

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.

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

Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.

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

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.

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.

I take every possible side.

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

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.

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

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.

Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society.

I write out of my intellectual experience.

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.