Quotes from Tom Stoppard

With plays that require any kind of reading program, I'm reading for a couple of years before using the material.

Personally, I read reviews because I'm interested by them, but they don't have utility for me.

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.

the natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. strangely enough it all works out in the end... it's a mystery.

The fact is that people are attracted to new work and by new work.

I'm not a theoretician about playwriting, but I have a strong sense that plays have to be pitched - the scene, the line, the word - at the exact point where the audience has just the right amount of information. It's like Occam's razor.

I feel that when I began writing, I had a need to know more about the play before I got into it. I think that's the way I was thinking. But my actual experience is that the best way to find out what the structure is, is by writing the play out laterally. You just have got to be brave enough to start without knowing where you are going.

I don't want to come over as some boringly self-deprecating person. But I don't see myself as a groundbreaking writer in the way plays are structured.

We're actors. We're the opposite of people.

I think I give the impression of being a romantic, and I think inside I'm quite severe. But some might say they had the opposite impression of me.

Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society.

Rewriting isn't just about dialogue; it's the order of the scenes, how you finish a scene, how you get into a scene.

One always likes to think that other countries are not like one's own.

Age is a high price to pay for maturity.

Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins

We've traveled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation

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.

The idea that all the people locked up in mental hospitals are sane while all the people walking about are mad is merely a literary cliche, put about by people who should be locked up. I assure you there is not much in it. Taken as a whole, the sane are out there the sick are in here. For example you are in here because you have delusions that sane people are put in mental hospitals.

Life in a box is better than no life at all ... I expect.

There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.

You can persuade a man to believe almost anything provided he is clever enough, but it is much more difficult to persuade someone less clever.

My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.

Never believe in mirrors or newspapers.

I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.