Quotes from Tom Stoppard

What a fine persecution—to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

Stark raving sane.

The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody.

The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—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.

It would have been nice to have had unicorns.

reality, the name we give to the common experience.

It's no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst.

I like plays where people talk a lot. Conversation is sustained. Argument is sustained.

I doubt that art needed Ruskin any more than a moving train needs one of its passengers to shove it.

A circle is the longest distance to same point.

Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.

"The [London] Times" has published no rumours; it's only reported facts, namely that other, less responsible papers are publishing certain rumours.

I was an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values against which art could be measured. I didn't trust my own subjective responses.

The way 'star' used to be reserved for a small number of people, and when the star category became so vast, they came up with 'superstar,' and then they came up with 'megastar.'

Despite the digital age, there is a very large number of venues and spaces that are looking for plays, and many of them are looking for new plays.

I can put two and two together, you know. Do not think you are dealing with a man who has lost his grapes.

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 don't write at the library, because I smoke when I work or would like the possibility of a smoke. Also, I need to be at my own desk.

I began writing for theater, and maybe because of that I've always thought of myself as a theater writer who does work in film sometimes.

Even when the writing seems very frivolous, I'm puritanical. I don't mean my subject matter. It's that I'm almost pathologically incapable of leaving something when I'm not quite happy with it.

It's no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst.

On Broadway, only the fire doors separate you from the sidewalk and you're lucky if the sound of a police car doesn't rip the envelope twice a night.

I adopted England as least as much as England adopted me.

I can be affectionate about a lot of things without watching them.