Quotes from Tom Stoppard

If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that. But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.

All mystical experience is coincidence; and vice versa, of course.

Biography is the mesh through which real life escapes.

The whole notion of journalism being an institution whose fundamental purpose is to educate and inform and even, one might say, elevate, has altered under commercial pressure, perhaps, into a different kind of purpose, which is to divert and distract and entertain.

Pink Floyd are one of a handful of bands I've listened to a lot and whose concerts I've been to. I love the experience. I don't dance; I just jig up and down like everybody else.

Life is a gamble, at terrible odds - if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.

I don't believe that we evolved moral psychology; it just doesn't seem plausible to me as a biological phenomenon.

The idea that public safety, the safety of the innocent, is an absolute which trumps every other consideration, is tacitly abandoned in the way we live.

When you write, it's making a certain kind of music in your head. There's a rhythm to it, a pulse, and on the whole, I'm writing to that drum rather than the psychological process.

My life is sectioned off into hot flushes, pursuits of this or that.

I would count myself as a friend of Vaclav Havel.

Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text.

In the period before the arrival of Mrs. Thatcher, politics had been in such low esteem. Everything was so hedged, so mealy-mouthed. Then along came this woman who seemed to have no manners at all and said exactly what she thought. Everyone's eyes were popping and their jaws were dropping, and I really enjoyed that.

It's really hard to talk about writing, and I'm usually conscious if I'm misleading people or misleading the questioner, because the problem with writing is the next line.

There are many, many more small theater spaces than there were when I was starting out.

I think of myself as a theater animal instead of an intellectual animal.

I don't believe there is something called 'film' and something called 'theater,' and that words belong in the theater. Some rather bad films have few words in them; some good films have a lot of words in them.

In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness.

Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.

Because theatre is a story-telling art form, we feel entitled to assume that the playwright got there before we got there.

Theatre probably originated without texts, but by the time we get to the classical Greek period, theatre has become text-based.

It was a different planet in 1967, the Broadway theatre. It had a little ashtray clamped to the back of every seat and the author got 10% of the gross.

I think theater ought to be theatrical.

I am not a mathematician, but I was aware that for centuries, mathematics was considered the queen of the sciences because it claimed certainty. It was grounded on some fundamental certainties - axioms - that led to others.