Quotes from Tom Stoppard

You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?

Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead.

A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.

Any revival in which I am involved is liable to change.

If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

If rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!

Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society.

I don't act, I don't direct, I don't design.

Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power.

I think that the present is worth attention, one shouldn't sacrifice it to future conceptions of, of this future or that future.

I like pop music. I consider rock 'n' roll to be a branch of pop music.

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.

I write out of my intellectual experience.

From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.

I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

You can't but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it's a narrative art form.

I was delighted to not go to university. I couldn't wait to be out of education.

From as long as, literally as far back as I can remember I've liked puns, word jokes, I can literally recall looking at a comic at the age of six or seven and I remember what I enjoyed and what it was precisely and how the joke worked.

Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?

Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end

Every exit is an entry somewhere.

For 10 years of my life, 3 times a day, I thanked the Lord for what I was about to receive and thanked him again for what I had just received, and then we lost touch and I suddenly thought, where is he now