FastSaying

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


Tom Stoppard

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Years and years ago, there was a production of The Tempest, out of doors, at an Oxford college on a ...
TOM STOPPARD There are no insurmountable obstacles
SUNDAY ADELAJA It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has ...
TOM STOPPARD Let me get it straight. Your father was king. You were his only son. Your father dies. You are of ag...
TOM STOPPARD Imaginary obstacles are insurmountable. Real ones aren't.
BARBARA SHER If doing anything new, you're very used to having insurmountable obstacles.
JONATHAN IVE I'm in the middle of the road, it seems vague of unclear way, of where I'm going but no matter what ...
HLONIM They stand uncertainly underneath immense skies, and everything about them is drowned.
JACK KEROUAC I heard the Denver and Rio Grande locomotives howling off in to the mountains. I wanted to pursue my...
JACK KEROUAC I read my copy of On the Road and dug the scenery whizzing past. On the Road is a semi-autobiographi...
CORY DOCTOROW It's a very different disaster. We are looking at a much higher number of refugees. And they face ob...
ERIC BLOCK Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a...
TOM STOPPARD ...and I realized no matter what you do it’s bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might a...
JACK KEROUAC Peace is a one-way road, ... Let us together remove the obstacles facing us.
YASSER ARAFAT Our opponents maintain that we are confronted with insurmountable political obstacles, but that may ...
THEODOR HERZL When I’m given a role, the first thing I do is read the play over and over again. I scour the scri...
TOM HIDDLESTON The best fiction is geared towards conflict. We learn most about our characters through tension, whe...
SUFJAN STEVENS There will be thousands of attacks, obstacles and people who will try to resist, block and disappoin...
SUNDAY ADELAJA If you have read this far in the chronicle of the Baudelaire orphans - and I certainly hope you have...
LEMONY SNICKET Obstacles aren't road blocks, they're stepping stones.
JEFFREY BENJAMIN The whole town had instantly gone to bed; the only noise now was barking dogs. How could I ever slee...
JACK KEROUAC I ate apple pie and ice cream—it was getting better as I got deeper into Iowa, the pie bigger, the...
JACK KEROUAC Somewhere along the line, the pearl would be handed to me.
JACK KEROUAC Fuck Kerouac; he would write his own story.
LINDA COLLISON Where we failed, Tricia succeeded. She was able to deliver a sale that no one thought could be done,...
PAUL SCHOFIELD If the road you travel, has no obstacles, It leads nowhere.
UNKNOWN I turn and kick with the first one and feel myself being lifted and thrown towards the beach. It's l...
MARK SMITH They took on a seemingly insurmountable task,
GEORGE RYAN Road to destination is often very straight with journey smooth, but majority has tendency to meander...
ANUJ SOMANY Empathy is the new measurement of everything. It doesn't matter what religion you have, what God you...
C. JOYBELL C. Life is not a game. Still, in this life, we choose the games we live to play.
J.R. RIM What's Your Road, Man?
JACK KEROUAC We all grew up, those of us who took On the Road to heart. We came to cringe a little at our ...
SARAH VOWELL Life is a series of waves to be embraced and overcome.
DANNY MEYER "If our Love is based on Conditions, Expectations, and Things, We are on the road to failure. If our...
TOM BAKER AKA THE PONDERING MAN Creating something that builds lasting value and changes the lives of millions of people requires fo...
JAY SAMIT His life seemed like a deck of cards, and in the midst of all those two’s and three’s someone ha...
TEKOA MANNING I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation. •George Bernard Shaw It is better ...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW Happiness and strength endure only in the absence of hate. To hate alone is the road to disaster. To...
L. RON HUBBARD I was at a dinner party many years ago,sitting along from Tom Stoppard, who in those days smoked not...
STEPHEN FRY In the journey of life, certain paths may seem to be leading nowhere because of a mountain or hill o...
ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH We've missed the road racing element of the series over the years, and I can't tell you how thrilled...
JAY SIGNORE I am often asked how it is that I am able to value people to such a deep degree. Apparently, I exhib...
C. JOYBELL C. As I'm sure you know, whenever you are examining someone else's belongings, you are bound to learn m...
LEMONY SNICKET Besides getting several paper cuts in the same day or receiving the news that someone in your family...
LEMONY SNICKET I just don't understand it," said Klaus, which was not something he said very often.
Violet nod...
LEMONY SNICKET The road to peace is never smooth. We expected obstacles in the implementation of peace agreement an...
LAZARUS SUMBEIYWO Non avevo niente da offrire a nessuno tranne la mia confusione.
JACK KEROUAC “Life can become a series of rainbows. We need to continually pray for the sun to come out after t...
TOM BAKER AKA THE PONDERING MAN "When we take a road trip it not the number of miles we drive, but the wonders of nature we observe....
TOM BAKER AKA THE PONDERING MAN The fact is that Tom Campbell is like you and me. He is not a career politician like Tom DeLay. He i...
MICHAEL STANLEY In the life of any actor or actress, there is inevitably a time when they will be eligible to act in...
ED STOPPARD The future will present insurmountable problems- only when we consider them insurmountable.
THOMAS S. MONSON I think these classes are good because it gives EMA directors a wide range of knowledge and differen...
DAVID JENNINGS There is not an imminent threat to human beings. There is not an imminent threat to the U.S. in any ...
MARC SIEGEL Imaginary obstacles are insurmountable. Real ones aren't. But you can't tell the difference when you...
BARBARA SHER You must save what you can of your life; you musn't lose it all simply because you've lost a part.
HENRY JAMES It all seems surreal, ... It was a long, tough road, but I learned a lot of valuable lessons along t...
SCOTT PODSEDNIK Republicans have been providing solutions and ideas since the immediate aftermath of the disaster, a...
NANCY PELOSI Seven points is a lot but it is not insurmountable,
ALEX FERGUSON Mother Superior jump the gun...
-The Beatles, Happiness is a Warm Gun
LAUREN MYRACLE The road to salvation is filled with many false dark turn-offs, if you take those roads they will le...
GARY F EVANS... [NEW YORK (Billboard) - Led by her newly recorded cover of Tom Petty 's] Refugee, ... Greatest Hits:...
MELISSA ETHERIDGE The best thing you can do for your kids is to show them God working in you on a daily basis.
CRAIG GROESCHEL A better way to help American companies compete against competitors abroad is to remove all series a...
MARCO RUBIO Jazz, to me, is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beatin...
LANGSTON HUGHES The lamp tipped over, nailing Kane in the head.
Sabin shook his head. The man was a walking dis...
GENA SHOWALTER I'm fucking the grave, I thought, I'm bringing the dead back to life...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI My life is a series of things that just happen.
HAROLD RUSSELL Life is a series of chapters, and one leads to another to another to another, and God knows what it ...
BOB BECKEL The only barrier to human development is ignorance, and this is not insurmountable.
ROBERT H. GODDARD Maybe memories should be left the way they are.
MELINA MARCHETTA The landscape started hard, sharp black mountains over my shoulder and thirsty young saguaros huggin...
LAURIE PEREZ Galatea Dunkel was a tenacious loser.
JACK KEROUAC Read about things that wouldn't keep you up all night long, weeping and tearing out your hair.
LEMONY SNICKET The Busch Series is quietly doing NBA or regular season baseball numbers. It's wearing out other spo...
BRIAN FRANCE it is possible that a criminal indictment of [Black] is likewise imminent.
CONRAD BLACK Boating is a wonderful and relaxing pastime, however it is not without its hazards.
CAPTAIN HANK BRACKER Shakespeare was such a lover of theatre, and theatre is an illusion.
DEAN GILMOUR Within three hours of a disaster event there should be a recon damage assessment of the infrastructu...
STEVEN VAN ZANDT Water jokes about the obstacles on its way; wise man jokes about the obstacles on his way!
MEHMET MURAT ILDAN ‎"In life we may find obstacles placed in our paths. These stumbling blocks are not to stop us, bu...
TOM BAKER AKA THE PONDERING MAN She dedicated herself before a disaster struck, and that is the message we try to get across: to get...
MIKE ADAMETZ When a child dies, a parent loses a part of themselves,” he said. “Your whole world ceases to ex...
NICOLE WILLIAMS You release the pain of the past and press on. It's a new day, and God is doing a new thing. He want...
CRAIG GROESCHEL There is nothing even close to imminent.
CRAIG PARSONS We are not repairing that road because of the imminent danger, perhaps, of the Morita dam. I don't w...
ROD HARAGA no announcement is imminent.
SEAN MCMANUS Powerlessness is an excruciating pain; it is torture insurmountable.
RICHELLE E. GOODRICH To act is to anchor in an imminent future, so imminent it becomes almost tangible; to act is to feel...
EMILE M. CIORAN She wasn't bitter. She was sad, though. But it was a hopeful kind of sad. The kind of sad that just ...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY So, I guess we are who we are for alot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY I love my mom so much. I don't care if that's corny to say. I think on my next birthday, I'm going t...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY We Are All Infinite
STEPHEN CHBOSKY (All the grief she had suffered over her lifetime had moulded her face into a mask of eternal sadnes...
JEAN SASSON You can't just sit there and put everyone's lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You ...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY I saw other people there. Old men sitting alone. Young girls with blue eye shadow and awkward jaws. ...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY That one moment when you know you are not a sad story. You are ALIVE.
STEPHAN CHBOSKY Somos quienes somos por un montón de razones.Quizás nunca conozcamos la mayoría de ellas.Pero aun...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY Ambos dijeron que tomara asiento y parecían hablar en serio, así que me senté.
STEPHEN CHBOSKY

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Good things, when short, are twice as good.
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TOM STOPPARD I'm offended by things and take pathetic little stands against them.
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TOM STOPPARD I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones...
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TOM STOPPARD For me, human rights simply endorse a view of life and a set of moral values that are perfectly clea...
TOM STOPPARD Every exit is an entry somewhere else.
TOM STOPPARD It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.
TOM STOPPARD Obviously, you would give your life for your children, or give them the last biscuit on the plate. B...
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TOM STOPPARD I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term w...
TOM STOPPARD A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.
TOM STOPPARD When I was 20, in 1957, and maybe you would say I was old enough to know better, but nevertheless, I...
TOM STOPPARD We give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain.
TOM STOPPARD The notion that the 'leader' has the right to ask huge sacrifices of your generation for a n...
TOM STOPPARD When I was a reporter in Bristol, which I was between the years 1954 and 1960, the newspaper would g...
TOM STOPPARD In January 1962, when I was the author of one and a half unperformed plays, I attended a student pro...
TOM STOPPARD Life is a gamble at terrible odds, if it were a bet, you would not take it.
TOM STOPPARD My family was in Singapore when the Japanese War started. We were in Singapore at the time of Pearl ...
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TOM STOPPARD Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?
TOM STOPPARD My brain cells are dying in their trillions.
TOM STOPPARD Age is a high price to pay for maturity.
TOM STOPPARD In Chekhov, everything blends into its opposite, just fractionally, and this is sort of unsettling. ...
TOM STOPPARD It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.
TOM STOPPARD Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
TOM STOPPARD Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.
TOM STOPPARD The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.
TOM STOPPARD Every exit is an entry somewhere.
TOM STOPPARD I don't think I can be expected to take seriously any game which takes less than three days to reach...
TOM STOPPARD Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picni...
TOM STOPPARD We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our prog...
TOM STOPPARD We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the r...
TOM STOPPARD Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.
TOM STOPPARD It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
TOM STOPPARD If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.
TOM STOPPARD Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.
TOM STOPPARD From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.
TOM STOPPARD I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.
TOM STOPPARD If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice.
TOM STOPPARD A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it...
TOM STOPPARD In 2005, I got an email from Belarus Free Theatre. They were emailing playwrights in America and Eng...
TOM STOPPARD A 'human right' is, by definition, timeless. It cannot adhere to some societies and not othe...
TOM STOPPARD I feel that when I began writing, I had a need to know more about the play before I got into it. I t...
TOM STOPPARD My intention still is to write a play to commemorate, possibly rather skeptically, the 50th annivers...
TOM STOPPARD I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put ...
TOM STOPPARD Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.
TOM STOPPARD A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.
TOM STOPPARD People have quite a simple idea about 'Anna Karenina.' They feel that the novel is entirely ...
TOM STOPPARD I have about a dozen cassettes lying about which I use in random order. Very often, I pick up a cass...
TOM STOPPARD I think... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of h...
TOM STOPPARD What Tolstoy is on about is that carnal love is not a good idea.
TOM STOPPARD Very often in Chekhov, where he exhibits a little bit of human behavior that you recognize as true, ...
TOM STOPPARD Chekhov understood that people are mysterious and can't be reduced to what we nowadays call '...
TOM STOPPARD I am not a mathematician, but I was aware that for centuries, mathematics was considered the queen o...
TOM STOPPARD Success is a sort of metaphysical experience. I live exactly as I did before - only on a slightly bi...
TOM STOPPARD There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we misse...
TOM STOPPARD Chekhov was capable of casually tossing off deplorable comments in his letters, combined with a very...
TOM STOPPARD If you let the plot be determined by what you feel is in the character's mind at that point, it ...
TOM STOPPARD I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocrac...
TOM STOPPARD One of the attractions of translating 'Heroes' is that it's not the kind of play that I ...
TOM STOPPARD It is easily and often overlooked that when Thomas Jefferson asserted that life, liberty and the pur...
TOM STOPPARD After all these years, I definitely associate having a pen in my hand with having an ashtray just ou...
TOM STOPPARD Because theatre is a story-telling art form, we feel entitled to assume that the playwright got ther...
TOM STOPPARD I barely remembered my father; I'm confused between genuine memory and the few photographs that ...
TOM STOPPARD I'm good at being funny.
TOM STOPPARD If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of...
TOM STOPPARD A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, pop...
TOM STOPPARD If I hadn't left Czechoslovakia, I would have been dead.
TOM STOPPARD I just happen to know quite a lot of what happened in Czechoslovakia between 1968 and the fall of Co...
TOM STOPPARD I went to an English school and was brought up in English. So I don't feel Czech.
TOM STOPPARD The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent - that rights are inherent - is unintelli...
TOM STOPPARD Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a...
TOM STOPPARD Each move is dictated by the previous one--that is the meaning of order
TOM STOPPARD Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are...condemned. Each move...
TOM STOPPARD Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society.
TOM STOPPARD The whole notion of journalism being an institution whose fundamental purpose is to educate and info...
TOM STOPPARD One doesn't want one's democracy to behave like a dictatorial or fascistic police. One doesn...
TOM STOPPARD Rosencrantz: Do you think death could possibly be a boat?
Guildenstern: No, no, no...Death is......
TOM STOPPARD Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over... Death is not anything...de...
TOM STOPPARD It's better to be quotable than to be honest.
TOM STOPPARD Life in a box is better than no life at all ... I expect.
TOM STOPPARD The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.
TOM STOPPARD We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on ...
TOM STOPPARD Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?
TOM STOPPARD The truth is always a compound of two half- truths, and you never reach it, because there is always ...
TOM STOPPARD The days of the digital watch are numbered.
TOM STOPPARD If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of...
TOM STOPPARD I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
TOM STOPPARD I agree with everything you say, but I would attack to the death your right to say it.
TOM STOPPARD Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God
TOM STOPPARD We're actors - we're the opposite of people.
TOM STOPPARD It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.
TOM STOPPARD Pirates could happen to anyone.
TOM STOPPARD Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over... Death is not anything... d...
TOM STOPPARD I think I enlist comedy to a serious purpose.
TOM STOPPARD That I have the right to express myself freely at all times in all circumstances entails the idea th...
TOM STOPPARD In the end, my children put me on to Pink Floyd when they were teenagers.
TOM STOPPARD Pink Floyd are one of a handful of bands I've listened to a lot and whose concerts I've been...
TOM STOPPARD When I was younger, I could do something useful just by being free for half a day, but now I need fi...
TOM STOPPARD You do know what's coming up when you're translating. I suppose the concentration, then, is ...
TOM STOPPARD Life is a gamble, at terrible odds - if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.
TOM STOPPARD For me, the reputation for teaching language in general, and East European languages most particular...
TOM STOPPARD Like many people, I only knew of Ford Madox Ford through a book called 'The Good Soldier,' w...
TOM STOPPARD A free press needs to be a respected press.
TOM STOPPARD He's someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks the most interesting thing about any st...
TOM STOPPARD I want to support the whole idea of the humanities and teaching the humanities as being something th...
TOM STOPPARD In the period before the arrival of Mrs. Thatcher, politics had been in such low esteem. Everything ...
TOM STOPPARD It is no light matter to put in jeopardy a single life when it is the very singularity of each life ...
TOM STOPPARD Chater: You dare to call me that. I demand satisfaction!

Septimus: Mrs Chater demanded sa...
TOM STOPPARD THOMASINA:
But then the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great...
TOM STOPPARD Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie t...
TOM STOPPARD My life feels, week to week, incomplete to the level of being pointless if I am not in preparation f...
TOM STOPPARD I'm not one of those writers who insist they don't read reviews and don't care much abou...
TOM STOPPARD All of my scripts are based on other people's novels. Generally, I consider myself as one who wr...
TOM STOPPARD Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it.
TOM STOPPARD I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that a...
TOM STOPPARD Lou Reed was a hero because he was an anti-hero.
TOM STOPPARD Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?
TOM STOPPARD It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can w...
TOM STOPPARD [Now] Bach ... a splash in the making.
TOM STOPPARD What a fine persecution - to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.
TOM STOPPARD Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order you can nudge t...
TOM STOPPARD If you took away everything in the world that had to be invented, there'd be nothing left except a l...
TOM STOPPARD Get me inside any boardroom and I'll get any decision I want.
TOM STOPPARD The sense of suppression, ... or self-suppression, and pressure generally which came off even this p...
TOM STOPPARD James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be un...
TOM STOPPARD The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility withou...
TOM STOPPARD My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other...
TOM STOPPARD A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's ...
TOM STOPPARD Eternity's a terrible thought
TOM STOPPARD We've traveled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without poss...
TOM STOPPARD We're actors. We're the opposite of people.
TOM STOPPARD the bewilderment and incomprehension of critics and audience.
TOM STOPPARD It's wholly deserved and I am completely thrilled. As a writer he has been unswerving for 50 years, ...
TOM STOPPARD wholly deserved and I'm completely thrilled.
TOM STOPPARD Every exit is an entrance somewhere else
TOM STOPPARD I don't respond well to the Olympic noise, which is the noise of nationalistic triumphalism.
TOM STOPPARD Years and years ago, there was a production of The Tempest, out of doors, at an Oxford college on a ...
TOM STOPPARD Traitors hoist by their own petard?--or victims of the gods?--we shall never know!
TOM STOPPARD I shall have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love, love, love, above all. Love as there has ne...
TOM STOPPARD It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to...
TOM STOPPARD It would have been nice to have had unicorns.
TOM STOPPARD It's where we're nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is g...
TOM STOPPARD It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has ...
TOM STOPPARD Seduced her? Every time I turned round she was up a library ladder. In the end I gave in. That remin...
TOM STOPPARD I actually went to an Oasis concert. I thought they were a brilliant songwriting band.
TOM STOPPARD You can't treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires.
TOM STOPPARD Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherw...
TOM STOPPARD Carnal embrace is sexual congress, which is the insertion of the male genital organ into the female ...
TOM STOPPARD HANNAH: Don't let Bernard get to you. It's only performance art, you know. Rhetoric, they used to te...
TOM STOPPARD Life is a gamble at terrible odds, if it were a bet, you would not take it
TOM STOPPARD A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.
TOM STOPPARD It is an interesting view of atheism, as a sort of "crutch" for those who can't stand the reality of...
TOM STOPPARD The idea of the state is, or should be, a very limited, prescribed idea. The state looks after the d...
TOM STOPPARD I have a spasm of envy for the person that was killed by a falling bookcase, as long as it doesn'...
TOM STOPPARD I was an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values again...
TOM STOPPARD What is the society we wish to protect? Is it the society of complete surveillance for the commonwea...
TOM STOPPARD Even when the writing seems very frivolous, I'm puritanical. I don't mean my subject matter....
TOM STOPPARD The idea that public safety, the safety of the innocent, is an absolute which trumps every other con...
TOM STOPPARD I feel overestimated.
TOM STOPPARD I'm not a theoretician about playwriting, but I have a strong sense that plays have to be pitche...
TOM STOPPARD We're actors — we're the opposite of people!
TOM STOPPARD Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something w...
TOM STOPPARD As a writer, Harold has been unswerving for 50 years,
TOM STOPPARD If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any g...
TOM STOPPARD I don't do interviews under false pretenses.
TOM STOPPARD Despite the digital age, there is a very large number of venues and spaces that are looking for play...
TOM STOPPARD I'm not like some other writers: I have no actual urgent need or desire to add to what's wri...
TOM STOPPARD I've voted in every election - not always for the same political party and never with any degree...
TOM STOPPARD I'm vaguely embarrassed by myself sometimes.
TOM STOPPARD As a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an ex...
TOM STOPPARD I like dialogue that is slightly more brittle than life. I have always admired and wished to write o...
TOM STOPPARD When I think of how things could have turned out, I feel as if I've dodged, not just bullets, bu...
TOM STOPPARD I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have...
TOM STOPPARD My scripts are possibly too talkative. Sometimes I watch a scene I've written, and occasionally ...
TOM STOPPARD Nobody would be killed on the roads if the speed limit were 10 miles an hour.
TOM STOPPARD There we were - demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man...
TOM STOPPARD Theater in New York is nearer to the street. In London, you have to go deep into the building, usual...
TOM STOPPARD I don't think falling in love in Slovakia is much different from falling in love in Tunbridge We...
TOM STOPPARD GUIL: It [Hamlet's madness] really boils down to symptoms. Pregnant replies, mystic allusions, mista...
TOM STOPPARD A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.
TOM STOPPARD There are certain sorts of jokes which have only to do with the substitution of the unexpected word ...
TOM STOPPARD Schepisi is the sort of director who could, would, and frequently did phone me whenever he came acro...
TOM STOPPARD Directors sometimes have good ideas that I wished I'd had, not on rewriting but simply on stagin...
TOM STOPPARD One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that...
TOM STOPPARD The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy.
TOM STOPPARD You end up going to school plays quite a bit as a parent, there are a lot of kids who are doing the ...
TOM STOPPARD Free to move, speak, extemporize, and yet. We have not been cut loose. Our truancy is defined by on...
TOM STOPPARD Let me get it straight. Your father was king. You were his only son. Your father dies. You are of ag...
TOM STOPPARD As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it...
TOM STOPPARD All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and...
TOM STOPPARD We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.
TOM STOPPARD Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway.
Guildenstern: What?
Rosencrantz: England.
...
TOM STOPPARD