I think... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process.


Tom Stoppard

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