FastSaying

My scripts are possibly too talkative. Sometimes I watch a scene I've written, and occasionally I think, 'Oh, for God's sake, shut up.'


Tom Stoppard

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MARGARET PETERSON HADDIX I used to watch 'Grey's Anatomy' pretty religiously.
ERINN HAYES Are you taking us to the beach?" - Dan Cahill
JUDE WATSON Let's head out to the ruins." - Dan Cahill
ROLAND SMITH About f-f-ace!" she said to the horse, flailing with her boots. "Into the barn, please. It's time fo...
PETER LERANGIS You see?" Damien leaned over his desk and spread out half a dozen charcoal sketches. "These are only...
RICK RIORDAN It looks ancient," - Amy Cahill
JUDE WATSON I'm still a big 'Grey's Anatomy' fan.
BROOKE ELLIOTT It SMELLS ancient," - Dan Cahill
JUDE WATSON Palm trees were fanned by a warm, light breeze, and they rolled down their windows to smell the sea.
JUDE WATSON I've got a few ideas," (Amy) admitted. "But I don't know where we're going in the long term. I mean ...
RICK RIORDAN On 'Grey's Anatomy,' I didn't have to move too much. I think I ran through the hospi...
ERIC DANE Alas, I think I am becoming a god.
TITUS Some men by ancestry are only the shadow of a mighty name.
LUCAN I have a wife, I have sons: all of them hostages given to fate.
LUCAN Don't have to see," the pilot grunted. "Olga knows the way."
"Funny name for an aircraft...
GORDON KORMAN Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.
SENECA Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness.
SENECA We never reflect how pleasant it is to ask for nothing.
SENECA Just as I shall select my ship when I am about to go on a voyage, or my house when I propose to take...
SENECA Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.
SENECA Luck is where opportunity meets preparation.
SENECA Friendship always benefits; love sometimes injures.
SENECA I always find Victoria's Secret models a bit weird.
EDIE CAMPBELL The last thing you want to do when you are about to film a scene is think, 'Oh my God, so many p...
KAREN GILLAN I don't even think my children are aware of what I've done. When somebody will ask me for my...
JACLYN SMITH It's horrible to think that a small cadre of people would manipulate that information. I mean, f...
DWIGHT SCHULTZ I really loved the 'Sopranos' but didn't have HBO. So someone would send me tapes of the...
TED SARANDOS I'm proud to say that I was that guy playing the character of Dr. Burke on 'Grey's Anato...
ISAIAH WASHINGTON I think there's always been hope in my songs, no matter how they've first appeared. I think ...
JAKOB DYLAN For me, I have this tough exterior and these Angela Bassett arms, and people think, 'Oh, my God,...
RUTINA WESLEY You see your peers weighing 80 pounds and you think, 'Oh, my God, I've got to be 80 pounds o...
CATHY RIGBY I am one of those faces that it's sometimes, 'Oh my God, you look so familiar, but I can'...
LINDSEY MCKEON The book is called 'Most Talkative,' because I was voted most talkative in high school. And ...
ANDY COHEN I think, whenever you're doing anything, you don't want anyone anywhere to watch it and thin...
CLAIRE FOY I've got a Kanji symbol on my shoulder; it's for my son and means 'strength and power.&#...
REY MYSTERIO I think talking about one's love life is always... It's a Pandora's box, best kept in jo...
EMMA CAULFIELD But inside, I'm going, 'Oh my God, is my zipper up? Do I have a booger in my nose?' That...
LEAH REMINI I think I've got to go back to 'Someone to Watch Over Me.' I think it's a perfectly ...
ROB MCCLURE My music is about my life. If it's something that I've lived, then it's something that I...
BIG SMO I've got a guy in my office that works 24/7 to shut down websites that are putting 'Dead Air...
CORBIN BERNSEN When the game is finished, it's completely finished. I'm with my kids. Sometimes people say ...
EDEN HAZARD I am a bit sickie happy. I am prone to black clouds too, but... I am embarrassed about them. It'...
OLIVIA COLMAN That's the thing I'm worst at: resting. I have to be forced to do it. Sometimes I think of l...
RONDA ROUSEY My parents are private investigators for God's sake.
MIRANDA LAMBERT Sometimes 'Rookie' is written about like, 'Finally! Something for alternative girls!'...
TAVI GEVINSON There are a lot of parents who've come to me and said about their daughters, 'Oh my God, she...
SOPHIA AMORUSO Every song I've written is luck, I think; it's luck - 'How did that just happen?'
DARON MALAKIAN Getting better from depression demands a lifelong commitment. I've made that commitment for my l...
SUSAN POLIS SCHUTZ And that's why I chose on purpose not to have a death scene. We've seen them in a million mo...
CHRISTINE LAHTI If you're doing something like 'Arcadia' by Tom Stoppard, which has been done millions a...
BEL POWLEY It's been a long haul. It may seem to some people that have never heard of me, 'Oh she just ...
LONI LOVE I thought, 'OK, Melissa Gilbert is playing my mom, and I'm playing her old role - no pressur...
KARA LINDSAY I never thought, 'Oh God, I'm in Prince's shadow.' He'd been performing for year...
VANITY The very first job I did, a Barbie commercial when I was eight or nine, that was like 'Oh my God...
BIANCA LAWSON I think sometimes people can get lost in the bigger special effects, science fiction, robot stuff, a...
DAKOTA FANNING I think they should create a holiday for friends-with-benefits relationships. Because I feel like Va...
ELIZABETH MERIWETHER I do think sometimes there's danger in guest appearance mania. I've seen too many examples t...
EZRA KOENIG Before 'Grey's Anatomy,' I was doing musicals, plays, commercials, you name it.
CHANDRA WILSON I've had times where I've joked, like, 'I'm going to move to Vermont and become a pa...
KATE MICUCCI I don't know what reception I'm at, but for God's sake give me a gin and tonic.
DENIS THATCHER I've been very lucky. I've written for most of my idols and the contemporaries.
ALAN ZWEIBEL Oh, I love Nottingham. I know some people go, 'Oh God, there's not much going off there,'...
VICKY MCCLURE It's very unusual on 'Game of Thrones' for there to be a deleted scene because the scrip...
ALEX GRAVES Just taking risks for risk's sake, that doesn't do it for me. I'm willing to take risks ...
CHRIS HADFIELD I'm a huge video gamer, sometimes a little too much. I'll shut myself in my room just so I c...
LUCAS TILL There's a tremendous difference between alone and lonely. You could be lonely in a group of peop...
DREW BARRYMORE Mainstream media has convinced people that black people aren't relatable. So when a Jewish perso...
ISSA RAE I see women in their 30s getting plastic surgery, pulling this up and tucking that back. It's li...
HALLE BERRY I think I've developed a sort of ADD for geography now. When I've been in a country for too ...
ELIZABETH DEBICKI My opinion is that you cannot really blame cinema for the result of what is somebody's mindset. ...
SONAKSHI SINHA I can't complain that I've had a public all through my writing life, but people don't qu...
ALAN BENNETT I honestly don't class myself as a songwriter. I've got 'musician' written on my pas...
ROBERT SMITH I love Charlie, Billy Burke's character. Writing for him is so spectacular, he's so funny an...
MELISSA ROSENBERG If you go all the way back, I've always written science-fiction, I've always written fantasy...
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN When people find out that I've written 208 novels, they ask, 'How did you think of all that?...
GILBERT MORRIS I've written songs sober and I've written songs high.
BARRY MANN I barely watch TV apart from the news. Most of it is rubbish. There's all this reality nonsense ...
LARRY HAGMAN If you watch a guy go out on court and have a meltdown, you're not going to think, 'Oh my Go...
JOHN MCENROE My head's not in the clouds, but I think I've gotten too much credit for being an astute bus...
STEVEN SPIELBERG I don't buy the tabloids, but you're surrounded by it all and people tell you things they...
FRANCESCA ANNIS I think sometimes we forget what we have, and occasionally it's important to remind ourselves.
BLAKE MYCOSKIE I've written fiction for as long as I can remember; it's always been my preferred form of pl...
TAIYE SELASI I've had a few encounters: At a restaurant, this woman that was like, 'Oh my God, oh my God,...
TAYLOUR PAIGE Oh, there's so much ego with men; in their head, they can't possibly think about Tesco's...
LESLEY MANVILLE I think age is just something written down on a piece of paper. I mean, you come across 20-year-olds...
EMMANUELLE SEIGNER I feel like I owe it to the readers to try to pull back the veil and give them the honest version of...
MAUREEN DOWD Most of the time, I don't even watch what I do on TV. I go in, get the job done, and just know i...
DAVID HEDISON I'm a comedian, for God's sake. Viewers shouldn't trust me. And you know what? They'...
DENNIS MILLER I've been in, like, kids' clubs... I've been in the Boom Boom Room in New York, and the ...
BRIAN GRAZER I have caught my reflection and thought, 'Oof. That girl is struggling. That girl is tired.'...
MELISSA MCCARTHY I'm not looking for a legacy, and you'll never shut up the critics. I've been around 50 ...
RUPERT MURDOCH I've written original material before, where I've come up with the idea and the characters m...
ALEX GARLAND I know God's voice. I've seen God's hand. If the Lord is my helper, why should I be afra...
JOHN PIPER I go into a young film director's office these days and he says, 'Hey man, I know who you ar...
MAKO For me, I can't watch violence when it's too grotesque, and it's just like, that's r...
AARON TAYLOR-JOHNSON I love to watch 'Chopped,' 'Jeopardy,' and 'Breaking Bad.' You can't pas...
MAE WHITMAN I think I've always had a certain amount of skepticism of this whole 'shut up and smile'...
AMBER HEARD I've been blessed with some lovely scripts and a character that people could truly identify with...
DWIGHT SCHULTZ I'm first and foremost a company man, surprising as that is. I love Warner Brothers. That's ...
TODD PHILLIPS

More Tom Stoppard

Good things, when short, are twice as good.
TOM STOPPARD Time is short, life is short, there's a lot to know. So I skip the entertainers in the newspaper...
TOM STOPPARD The thing that happens remarkably often is that the people who are writing a dissertation believe th...
TOM STOPPARD I'm offended by things and take pathetic little stands against them.
TOM STOPPARD My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.
TOM STOPPARD The text loses its virginity simply by being staged: it's no longer the abstract ideal version; ...
TOM STOPPARD I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones...
TOM STOPPARD Any revival in which I am involved is liable to change.
TOM STOPPARD Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.
TOM STOPPARD All your life, you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. An...
TOM STOPPARD Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
TOM STOPPARD The whole philosophy of modern times is to dissolve distinctions between individuals and deal with t...
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...
TOM STOPPARD From as long as, literally as far back as I can remember I've liked puns, word jokes, I can lite...
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 ...
TOM STOPPARD It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing.
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 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