Top 200 Tom Stoppard Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I shall have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love, love, love, above all. Love as there has never been in a play. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture.”

— Tom Stoppard

52. “It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”

— Tom Stoppard

53. “The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody.”

— Tom Stoppard

54. “Save the gerund and screw the whale.”

— Tom Stoppard

55. “Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.”

— Tom Stoppard

56. “What a fine persecution – to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.”

— Tom Stoppard

57. “It is a defect of God’s humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.”

— Tom Stoppard

58. “Seduced her? Every time I turned round she was up a library ladder. In the end I gave in. That reminds me – I spotted something between her legs that made me think of you.”

— Tom Stoppard

59. “All mystical experience is coincidence; and vice versa, of course.”

— Tom Stoppard

60. “The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.”

— Tom Stoppard

61. “Death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.”

— Tom Stoppard

62. “A circle is the longest distance to same point.”

— Tom Stoppard

63. “Wars are fought for oil wells and coaling stations; for control of the Dardanelles or the Suez Canal; for colonial pickings to buy cheap in and conquered markets to sell dear in. War is capitalism with the gloves off.”

— Tom Stoppard

64. “It would have been nice to have had unicorns.”

— Tom Stoppard

65. “Audiences know what to expect, and that is all that they are prepared to believe in.”

— Tom Stoppard

66. “A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.”

— Tom Stoppard

67. “People think there’s a choice between smoking and immortality, but we’ve all got to die of something.”

— Tom Stoppard

68. “Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.”

— Tom Stoppard

69. “I can put two and two together, you know. Do not think you are dealing with a man who has lost his grapes.”

— Tom Stoppard

70. “It’s the wanting to know that makes us matter.”

— Tom Stoppard

71. “Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light.”

— Tom Stoppard

72. “You can persuade a man to believe almost anything provided he is clever enough, but it is much more difficult to persuade someone less clever.”

— Tom Stoppard

73. “If you took away everything in the world that had to be invented, there’d be nothing left except a lot of people getting rained on.”

— Tom Stoppard

74. “There’s something scary about stupidity made coherent.”

— Tom Stoppard

75. “If you were handed power on a plate you’d be left fighting over a plate.”

— Tom Stoppard

76. “Never believe in mirrors or newspapers.”

— Tom Stoppard

77. “It is better to be quotable than to be honest.”

— Tom Stoppard

78. “We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. but there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.”

— Tom Stoppard

79. “You think human nature is a beast, that it must be put in a cage. But it’s the cage that makes the animal bad.”

— Tom Stoppard

80. “I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus.”

— Tom Stoppard

81. “There is truth and falsehood in a comma.”

— Tom Stoppard

82. “I should have the courage of my lack of convictions.”

— Tom Stoppard

83. “I’m vaguely embarrassed by myself sometimes.”

— Tom Stoppard

84. “I don’t think I can be expected to take seriously any game which takes less than three days to reach its conclusion.”

— Tom Stoppard

85. “The results of the divorce between truth and human beings can be most graphically observed in politics.”

— Tom Stoppard

86. “The fact is that people are attracted to new work and by new work.”

— Tom Stoppard

87. “We must be born with an intuition of mortality.”

— Tom Stoppard

88. “There is no one so radical as a man-servant whose freedom of the champagne bin has been interfered with.”

— Tom Stoppard

89. “I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.”

— Tom Stoppard

90. “If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.”

— Tom Stoppard

91. “For a long time I managed to think two things simultaneously, that I am actually a good playwright, and that the next time I write a play I will be revealed as someone who is no good at all.”

— Tom Stoppard

92. “I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.”

— Tom Stoppard

93. “Fatherlessness didn’t strike me as being an event. It was a state of life.”

— Tom Stoppard

94. “ROS: Why don’t you go and have a look? GUIL: Pragmatism?! – is that all you have to offer?”

— Tom Stoppard

95. “I read for interest and enjoyment, and when I cease to enjoy it I stop.”

— Tom Stoppard

96. “I write out of my intellectual experience.”

— Tom Stoppard

97. “If rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!”

— Tom Stoppard

98. “Act first! The ideas will follow, and if not – well, it’s progress.”

— Tom Stoppard

99. “Of all forms of fiction, autobiography is the most gratuitous.”

— Tom Stoppard

100. “The Plastic People of the Universe played ‘Venus in Furs’ from Velvet Underground, and I knew everything was basically okay.”

— Tom Stoppard