Tom Stoppard quotes:

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

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.

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

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.

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The whole thing about writing a play is that it's all about controlling the flow of information traveling from the stage to the audience. It's a stream of information, but you've got your hand on the tap, and you control in which order the audience receives it and with what emphasis, and how you hold it all together.

The Importance of Being Earnest' is important, but it says nothing about anything.

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.

The printed word is no longer as in demand as when I was of the age of pupils or even at the age of the teachers teaching them.

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

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.

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.

When I was younger, I could do something useful just by being free for half a day, but now I need five days to get the world I've left out of my head and ten days or a fortnight not talking to anyone to hold what I need to hold inside my head.

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

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.

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

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.

I actually went to an Oasis concert. I thought they were a brilliant songwriting band.

I'm not a theoretician about playwriting, but I have a strong sense that plays have to be pitched - the scene, the line, the word - at the exact point where the audience has just the right amount of information. It's like Occam's razor.

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

I feel that when I began writing, I had a need to know more about the play before I got into it. I think that's the way I was thinking. But my actual experience is that the best way to find out what the structure is, is by writing the play out laterally. You just have got to be brave enough to start without knowing where you are going.

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

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.

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.

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.

If I am on a journey where I only have time to read one-and-a-half books, I never know which one-and-a-half I'll feel like reading. So I bring eight.

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

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

The whole philosophy of modern times is to dissolve distinctions between individuals and deal with them as large collections of people. It's essentially self-interested on the part of authority.

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

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.

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 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.

Quite early on, and certainly since I started writing, I found that philosophical questions occupied me more than any other kind. I hadn't really thought of them as being philosophical questions, but one rapidly comes to an understanding that philosophy's only really about two questions: 'What is true?' and 'What is good?'

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The possibilities are infinite with new writing; every time you open a new script, there's no limit to what it might contain.

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.

It is easily and often overlooked that when Thomas Jefferson asserted that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were inalienable human rights, he did so on the ground that they had been endowed by God, our Creator.

I've voted in every election - not always for the same political party and never with any degree of enthusiasm.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

You don't often get a proposal to do Tolstoy for a really interesting director - that's easy to say yes to.

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.

I don't believe there is something called 'film' and something called 'theater,' and that words belong in the theater. Some rather bad films have few words in them; some good films have a lot of words in them.

It is better to be quotable than to be honest.

It's better to be quotable than to be honest.

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

I'm attracted to the past.

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

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.

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

Time is short, life is short, there's a lot to know. So I skip the entertainers in the newspaper now. I just haven't got time.

I'm good at being funny.

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.

Pink Floyd are one of a handful of bands I've listened to a lot and whose concerts I've been to. I love the experience. I don't dance; I just jig up and down like everybody else.

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

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

Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.

There are many, many more small theater spaces than there were when I was starting out.

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

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

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

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.

One always likes to think that other countries are not like one's own.

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.

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

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

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 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.

I like dialogue that is slightly more brittle than life. I have always admired and wished to write one of those 1940s film scripts where every line is written with a sharpness and economy that is frankly artificial.

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

I don't think falling in love in Slovakia is much different from falling in love in Tunbridge Wells.

I think that the present is worth attention, one shouldn't sacrifice it to future conceptions of, of this future or that future.

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

I don't draw on my inner life in my work.

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

Traitors hoist by their own petard?--or victims of the gods?--we shall never know!"

I shall have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love, love, love, above all. Love as there has never been in a play. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture."

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

If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could.

I think theater ought to be theatrical ... you know, shuffling the pack in different ways so that it's -- there's always some kind of ambush involved in the experience. You're being ambushed by an unexpected word, or by an elephant falling out of the cupboard, whatever it is.

We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now.

Rewriting isn't just about dialogue, it's the order of the scenes, how you finish a scene, how you get into a scene. All these final decisions are best made when you're there, watching. It's really enjoyable, but you've got to be there at the director's invitation. You can't just barge in and say, "I'm the writer."

It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

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

I'm a very boring person.

Every exit is an entry somewhere else.

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.

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

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.

Having translated two plays by Chekhov, and not speaking Russian myself - I cannot say one sentence. This may shock people... However, I am not shocked, as it is not hard to find out what the words mean.

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

I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.

The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.

It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.

To the engineer, all matter in the universe can be placed into one of two categories: (1) things that need to be fixed, and (2) things that will need to be fixed after you've had a few minutes to play with them. Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

The days of the digital watch are numbered.

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.

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

If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that. But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.

The truth is always a compound of two half- truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say.