Tom Stoppard quote: "When I was younger, I could do something useful just by being free for half a day, but now I need five days to get the world I've left out of my head and ten days or a fortnight not talking to anyone to hold what I need to hold inside my head."

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

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

When I was younger, I could do something useful just by being free for half a day, but now I need five days to get the world I've left out of my head and ten days or a fortnight not talking to anyone to hold what I need to hold inside my head.

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Tom Stoppard

When I was younger, I could do something useful just by being free for half a day, but now I need five days to get the world I've left out of my head and ten days or a fortnight not talking to anyone to hold what I need to hold inside my head.

Tom Stoppard

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