Quotes from Tom Stoppard

Every exit is an entry somewhere else.

The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.

I am as miserable as anyone - sometimes.

Chekhov was capable of casually tossing off deplorable comments in his letters, combined with a very modern anger against anti-Semitism.

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

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.

We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there's only one direction. And time is its only measure.

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.

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

When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.

It's the wanting to know that makes us matter.

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

Rosencrantz: Shouldn't we be doing something--constructive? Guildenstern: What did you have in mind? ... A short, blunt human pyramid...?

For all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.

It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?

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

Audiences know what to expect, and that is all that they are prepared to believe in.

I love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it. I love the way it blurs the distinction between everyone who isn't one's lover.

Give us this day our daily mask.

Uncertainty is the normal state.

I'm going to be dead before I read the books I'm going to read.

Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occurred to you that you don't go on forever. It must have been shattering, stamped into one's memory. And yet, I can't remember it.

Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn't death! You scream and choke and sink to your knees but it doesn't bring death home to anyone- it doesn't catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says- 'One day you are going to die.