Quotes from Tom Stoppard

Well, he us a nab, he is mortal, death comes to us all, etcetera, and consequently he would have died anyways, sooner or later. Or to look at it from the social point of view - he's just one man among many, the loss would be well within reason and convenience.

Every exit is an Entry somewhere else.

I want a good story, with a beginning, middle and end.

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.

Inside where nothing shows, I am the essence of a man spinning double-headed coins, and betting against himself in private atonement for an unremembered past.

A lesson in folly is worth two in wisdom.

In an age when the difference between prince and peasant was thought to be in the stars, Mr Tzara, art was naturally an affirmation for the one and a consolation to the other; but we live in an age when the social order is seen to be the work of material forces and we have been given an entirely new kind of responsibility, the responsibility of changing society.

I got dizzy, he explained. I should think you did. What were you doing?' Nothing, said Moon. I was trying to face one way or the other and I got confused and fell over. Let that be my epitaph.

Belinsky: 'Who is this Moloch that eats his children?' Herzen: 'It's the Ginger Cat.

Bernard: ... By the way, Valentina, do you want credit? - 'the game book recently discovered by.'? Valentine: It was never lost, Bernard. Bernard: 'As recently pointed out by.' I don't normally like giving credit where it's due, but with scholarly articles as with divorce, there is a certain cachet in citing a member of the aristocracy. I'll pop it in ad lib for the lecture, and give you a mention in the press release. How's that? Valentine: Very kind.

My dear Tristan, to be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.

Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.

If everything from the furthest planet to the smallest atom of our brain acts according to Newton's law of motion, what becomes of free will?

So it is with us all, we're not so one-or-the-other. The one who puts on the clothes in the morning is the working majority, but at night-perhaps in the moment before unconsciousness- we meet our sleeper- the priest is visited by the doubter, the Marxist sees the civilizing force of the bourgeoisie, the captain of the industry admits the justice of common ownership.

We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those left behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. -

Morality makes no difference legally.

The days of the digital watch are numbered.

Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.

getting away with murder must be quite easy provided that one's motive is sufficiently inscrutable.

ROS: I want to go home. Which way did we come in? I've lost my sense of direction. GUIL: The only beginning is birth and the only end is death - if you can't count on that, what can you count on?

No, no, no... you've got it all wrong... you can't act death. The fact of it is nothing to do with seeing it happen ---it's not gasps and blood and falling about---that isn't what makes it death. It's just a man failing to reappear, that's all ---now you see him, now you don't, that the only thing that's real: here one minute and gone the next and never coming back---an exit, unobtrusive and unannounced, a disappearance gathering weight as it goes on, until, finally, it is heavy with death.

Lending one's bicycle is a form of safe sex, possibly the safest there is.

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

SEPTIMUS: When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore. THOMASINA: Then we will dance. Is this a waltz?