Famous Quotes

Quotes by Tom Stoppard

• A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.
• Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
• Any revival in which I am involved is liable to change.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.
• I don't act, I don't direct, I don't design.
• 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.
• I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
• I think that the present is worth attention, one shouldn't sacrifice it to future conceptions of, of this future or that future.
• I was delighted to not go to university. I couldn't wait to be out of education.
• 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 write out of my intellectual experience.
• 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's not the voting that's democracy it's the counting.
• 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.
• Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
• 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.
• Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society.
• 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.