Quotes from Tom Stoppard

His radio plays include: If You're Glad I'll Be Frank, Albert's Bridge (Italia Prize), Where Are They Now?, Artist Descending A Staircase, The Dog It Was That Died, In the Native State (Sony Award).

Tom Stoppard's other work includes: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties, Night and Day, After Magritte, The Real Thing, Enter A Free Man, Hapgood, Arcadia, Indian Ink (a stage adaptation of his own play, In the Native State) and The Invention of Love. Arcadia

Girls who kiss don't know Latin.

For you, freedom means leave me alone. For the masses, it means give me a break.

Defeatism means turning a disaster into a moral victory.

If you act only on what you should do without heed for what you want to do, you're nothing more than a machine, a phenomenon.

GUIL (hevesen megragadja) MIT GONDOLSZ, KI VAGY TE? ROS Szónoki kérdés. Gém, meccs!

Világéletedben olyan közel éltél az igazsághoz, hogy tartósan elhomályosította a látótered, és ha valami történetesen fókuszba pöcköli, már a groteszkség csapdájába esik.

This is not a drill.

The Almost Free Theatre, the Fun Art Bus and the rest of them were phenomena of a decade which was simultaneously playful and desperately serious; and

I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way contradicting yourself.

I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.

After Magritte often serves as a companion piece to The Real Inspector Hound, which I think is appropriate in at least one way: neither play is about anything grander than itself. A

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

Only in art can empires cheat oblivion,..

The 'role of the theatre' is much debated (by almost nobody, of course), but the thing defines itself in practice first and foremost as a recreation. This seems satisfactory. TOM STOPPARD 1993

The whole of life is like that now. It's even impossible to think naturally because opinion has been set out for you to read back. Originality has been used up. And yet faith in one's uniqueness dies hard.

Thomasina Correct? What was incorrect in it? (She looks into the book.) Alpha minus? Pooh! What is the minus for? Septimus For doing more than was asked. Thomasina You did not like my discovery? Septimus A fancy is not a discovery. Thomasina A gibe is not a rebuttal.

We live amidst absurdity, so close to it that it escapes our notice.

PLAYER : It costs little to watch, and little more if you happen to get caught up in the action, if that's your taste and times being what they are.

Being a person is respect, because you're not a cat or a dog or a bunch of tulips, you're a human person and humanness isn't like something there can be different amounts of, it's maxed out from the start, total respect every time - kill one, kill a trainload, you're dissing the transcendental is all.

The trouble is I don't like the pop music which it's all right to like. You can have a bit of Pink Floyd shoved in between your symphonies and your Dame Janet Baker — that shows a refreshing breadth of taste or at least a refreshing candour.

GUIL And a syllogism: One, he has never known anything like it. Two, he has never known anything to write home about. Three, it is nothing to write home about. . . . Home . . . What's the first thing you remember? ROS Oh, let's see . . . The first thing that comes into my head, you mean? GUIL No—the first thing you remember. ROS Ah. (Pause.) No, it's no good, it's gone. It was a long time ago.

The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about — clouds — daffodils — waterfalls — and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in — these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.