Quotes from Tom Stoppard

Do you think death could possibly be a boat? No, no, no...death is...not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not-be on a boat. I've frequently not been on boats. No, no no - what you've been is not on boats.

The strongest, the most certain thing I think I know about the process is there is really, really good news if you end up feeling lucky rather than clever.

No mischlinge in journalism, the creative arts, the performing arts, literature . . . Culture is verboten.

There is an art to the building up of suspense.

Le goût juif, the French said.

The future is disorder.

BAKUNIN:    Left to themselves, people are noble, generous, uncorrupted, they'd create a completely new kind of society if only people weren't so blind, stupid and selfish.

GULL (musing) : The law of probability, it has been oddly asserted, is something to do with the proposition that if six monkeys (he has surprised himself) ... if six monkeys were .. . ROS: Game? GULL: Were they? ROS: Are you? GULL (understanding): Game. (Flips a coin.) The law of averages, if I have got this right, means that if six monkeys were thrown up in the air for long enough they would land on their tails about as often as they would land on their

Don't let Bernard get to you. It's only performance art, you know. Rhetoric. They used to teach it in ancient times, like PT. It's not about being right, they had philosophy for that. Rhetoric was their chat show. Bernard's indignation is a sort of aerobics for when he gets on television.

Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

ALEXANDER (cont.):     How the world must have been changing while I was holding it still.

If knowledge isn't self-knowledge it isn't doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing 'When Father Painted the Parlour'? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you.

all mystical experience is coincidence; and vice versa, of course.

Croom He insists on it, and finds the proof of his wife's virtue in his eagerness to defend it.

Yes, I think you're the first person to think of this.

I had a dream which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air

Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured.

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.

War is capitalism with the gloves off and many who go to war know it but they go to war because they don't want to be a hero.

How the hell do I know what I find incredible? Credibility is an expanding field... Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight.

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.

Nobody would be killed on the roads if the speed limit were 10 miles an hour.

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?'

Chekhov understood that people are mysterious and can't be reduced to what we nowadays call 'motivation.'