Quotes by Tom Stoppard

About Tom Stoppard:

Sir Tom Stoppard is a British playwright, knighted in 1997. He has written prolifically for TV, radio, film and stage, finding prominence with plays such as Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professional Foul, The Real Thing, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. He co-wrote the screenplays for Brazil, The Russia House, and Shakespeare in Love, and has received one Academy Award and four Tony Awards. Themes of human rights, censorship and political freedom pervade his work along with exploration of linguistics and philosophy. Stoppard has been a key playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.

Tom Stoppard

If I had been asked to write 1,200 words for a newspaper tomorrow, on any subject, I would just do it rather than leave a white hole in the page. And I think it's a very healthy attitude to take to writing anything.

Tom Stoppard

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

Tom Stoppard

I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

Tom Stoppard

If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music and of aviation.

Tom Stoppard

From as long as, literally as far back as I can remember I've liked puns, word jokes, I can literally recall looking at a comic at the age of six or seven and I remember what I enjoyed and what it was precisely and how the joke worked.

Tom Stoppard

The printed word is no longer as in demand as when I was of the age of pupils or even at the age of the teachers teaching them.

Tom Stoppard

Despite the digital age, there is a very large number of venues and spaces that are looking for plays, and many of them are looking for new plays.

Tom Stoppard

Chekhov was capable of casually tossing off deplorable comments in his letters, combined with a very modern anger against anti-Semitism.

Tom Stoppard

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

Tom Stoppard

You can't but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it's a narrative art form.

Tom Stoppard

I was an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values against which art could be measured. I didn't trust my own subjective responses.

Tom Stoppard

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

Tom Stoppard

My intention still is to write a play to commemorate, possibly rather skeptically, the 50th anniversary of the Russian revolution. I started it at the beginning of 1966, but confronted with the enormous importance and reality of that revolution, I ab...

Tom Stoppard

Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life...

Tom Stoppard

He thinks of the rotten parachute they played with as kids in Arcadia: they hurtle through life aging unimaginably fast, but each grasps a silken edge of memory that billows between them and softens the long fall.

Tom Stoppard

What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?

Tom Stoppard

Childhood is such a delicate tissue; what they had done this morning could snag somewhere in the little ones, make a dull, small pain that will circle back again and again, and hurt them in small ways for the rest of their lives.

Tom Stoppard

Chater: You dare to call me that. I demand satisfaction! Septimus: Mrs Chater demanded satisfaction and now you are demanding satisfaction. I cannot spend my time day and night satisfying the demands of the Chater family.

Tom Stoppard

If knowledge isn't self-knowledge it isn't doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing 'When Father Painted the Parlour'? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you. 'She walks into be...

Tom Stoppard

THOMASINA: But then the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue!

Tom Stoppard

Author Bio

  • NameTom Stoppard
  • DescriptionBritish playwright
  • BornJuly 3, 1937
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionPlaywright; Screenwriter; Journalist; Writer
  • AwardsLaurence Olivier Award; Commander Of The Order Of The British Empire; PEN Pinter Prize; Laurel Award For Screenwriting Achievement; Academy Award For Best Writing (Original Screenplay); Writers Guild Of America Award; Praemium Imperiale