Quotes from Tom Stoppard

I really just like to be at a desk.

The printed word is no longer as in demand as when I was of the age of pupils or even at the age of the teachers teaching them.

For me, the reputation for teaching language in general, and East European languages most particularly, gave Glasgow University, and by reflection the country, a distinction.

I want to support the whole idea of the humanities and teaching the humanities as being something that - even if it can't be quantitatively measured as other subjects - it's as fundamental to all education.

The days of the digitals are numbered. The metaphor is built into them like a self-destruct mechanism.

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

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

My life feels, week to week, incomplete to the level of being pointless if I am not in preparation for the next play or, ideally, into it.

When you try to grasp the way the Western world is going, you see that we are on a ratchet towards a surveillance state, which is coming to include the whole population in its surveillance. This is our reward for accepting the restraints on the way we live now.

When I was 20, in 1957, and maybe you would say I was old enough to know better, but nevertheless, I was completely nuts about Buddy Holly. And I loved pop bands that had absolutely no intellectual pretensions whatsoever. I loved the Monkees.

The notion that the 'leader' has the right to ask huge sacrifices of your generation for a notional future paradise - if you'd be good enough to lie down under the wheels of the juggernaut - that sentimental and self-aggrandising rationalisation for brute force and cowardice I felt from adolescence was wrong.

Schepisi is the sort of director who could, would, and frequently did phone me whenever he came across a textual problem.

One feels that the past stays the way you left it, whereas the present is in constant movement; it's unstable all around you.

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

People have quite a simple idea about 'Anna Karenina.' They feel that the novel is entirely about a young married woman who falls in love with a cavalry officer and leaves her husband after much agony, and pays the price for that.

A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.

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

To be in love with Debo Devonshire is hardly a distinction.

I have a spasm of envy for the person that was killed by a falling bookcase, as long as it doesn't happen prematurely.

Writing a new play shouldn't be seen as a mystery belonging to a priesthood, but as a challenge, a technical challenge, just to get into it.

In the end, my children put me on to Pink Floyd when they were teenagers.

I'm a conservative kind of person. I don't think rightwing is quite the same thing. But I acknowledge my conservatism of temperament.

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.

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.