Quotes from Tom Stoppard

To be 64 is appalling, so what does it matter being 65?

One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time.

Like many people, I only knew of Ford Madox Ford through a book called 'The Good Soldier,' which is everybody's favorite Ford Madox Ford if they have one, but I came to read 'Parade's End' when it was suggested via Damien Timmer of Mammoth Screen.

It takes a lot of effort to be vibrant.

In January 1962, when I was the author of one and a half unperformed plays, I attended a student production of 'The Birthday Party' at the Victoria Rooms in Bristol. Just before it began, I realised that Harold Pinter was sitting in front of me.

For me, human rights simply endorse a view of life and a set of moral values that are perfectly clear to an eight-year-old child. A child knows what is fair and isn't fair, and justice derives from that knowledge.

When we have found all the meanings and lost all the mysteries, we will be alone, on an empty shore.

I'm attracted to the past.

The more doors there are for you to open, the better the play.

I'm vaguely embarrassed by myself sometimes.

The text loses its virginity simply by being staged: it's no longer the abstract ideal version; it's an event.

No one gets up after death-there is no applause-there is only silence and some second-hand clothes, and that's death.

As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.

Although I don't examine myself in this respect, I would say, off the top of my head, that I've come to acknowledge my Czechness more as I get older.

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

...reality, the name we give to the common experience.

Fantasy flows in where fact leaves a vacuum.

Let me get it straight. Your father was king. You were his only son. Your father dies. You are of age. Your uncle becomes king." "Yes." "Unorthodox.

GUIL: A scientific approach to the examination of phenomena is a defence against the pure emotion of fear

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

If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.

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

If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music, and of aviation.

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.