Top 200 Tom Stoppard Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Each move is dictated by the previous one – that is the meaning of order.”

— Tom Stoppard

152. “Underneath runs the main current of preoccupation, which is keeping one’s nose clean at all times. This means that when things go wrong you have to pass the blame along the line, like pass-the-parcel, till the music stops.”

— Tom Stoppard

153. “My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.”

— Tom Stoppard

154. “You’re familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?”

— Tom Stoppard

155. “I love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it. I love the way it blurs the distinction between everyone who isn’t one’s lover.”

— Tom Stoppard

156. “To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.”

— Tom Stoppard

157. “Give us this day our daily mask.”

— Tom Stoppard

158. “A lesson in folly is worth two in wisdom.”

— Tom Stoppard

159. “I’m so grateful to grab hold of something that wants to be a play. It doesn’t happen very often. I don’t have unwritten plays waiting for their turn.”

— Tom Stoppard

160. “If an idea’s worth having once, it’s worth having twice.”

— Tom Stoppard

161. “The whole philosophy of modern times is to dissolve distinctions between individuals and deal with them as large collections of people. It’s essentially self-interested on the part of authority.”

— Tom Stoppard

162. “What are a friend’s books for if not to be borrowed?”

— Tom Stoppard

163. “Suicide is no more than a trick played on the calendar.”

— Tom Stoppard

164. “Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.”

— Tom Stoppard

165. “We keep to our usual stuff, more or less, only inside out. We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else.”

— Tom Stoppard

166. “The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe – responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.”

— Tom Stoppard

167. “There is presumably a calendar date a moment when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, secretly, the noes had it.”

— Tom Stoppard

168. “No matter how imperfect things are, if you’ve got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.”

— Tom Stoppard

169. “I’m the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal and rebut the refutation. Endlessly.”

— Tom Stoppard

170. “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 beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that’s best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.”

— Tom Stoppard

171. “There must have been a time, in the beginning, when we could have said – no. But somehow we missed it. Oh well, we’ll know better next time.”

— Tom Stoppard

172. “A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar – you pretend it’s not there.”

— Tom Stoppard

173. “I don’t keep a diary and I throw away nearly all the paper I might have kept. I don’t keep an archive. There’s something worrying about my make-up that I try to leave no trace of myself apart from my plays.”

— Tom Stoppard

174. “The hard part is getting to the top of page 1.”

— Tom Stoppard

175. “I don’t really have a system or set of principles. It’s kind of common sense mixed up with instinct.”

— Tom Stoppard

176. “If the audience is made to do not enough work, they resent it without knowing it. Too much and they get lost. There’s a perfect pace to be found. And a perfect place that is different for every line of the play.”

— Tom Stoppard

177. “I will take his secret to the grave, telling people I meet on the way.”

— Tom Stoppard

178. “Biography is the mesh through which real life escapes.”

— Tom Stoppard

179. “To say that it is without pace, point, focus, interest, drama, wit or originality is to say simply that it does not happen to be my cup of tea.”

— Tom Stoppard

180. “A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.”

— Tom Stoppard

181. “They had it in for us, didn’t they? Right from the beginning. Who’d have thought that we were so important?”

— Tom Stoppard

182. “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

183. “A genuine love of learning is one of the two delinquencies which cause blindness and lead a young man to ruin.”

— Tom Stoppard

184. “In January 1962, when I was the author of one and a half unperformed plays, I attended a student production of ‘The Birthday Party’ at the Victoria Rooms in Bristol. Just before it began, I realised that Harold Pinter was sitting in front of me.”

— Tom Stoppard

185. “I’m hopeless at looking into myself and trying to see how things are working and why.”

— Tom Stoppard

186. “Be happy – if you’re not even happy, what’s so good about surviving?”

— Tom Stoppard

187. “I’m a conservative kind of person. I don’t think rightwing is quite the same thing. But I acknowledge my conservatism of temperament.”

— Tom Stoppard

188. “I think that the present is worth attention, one shouldn’t sacrifice it to future conceptions of, of this future or that future.”

— Tom Stoppard

189. “Kissing girls is not like science, nor is it like sport. It is the third thing when you thought there were only two.”

— Tom Stoppard

190. “I like pop music. I consider rock ‘n’ roll to be a branch of pop music.”

— Tom Stoppard

191. “Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God’s crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can’t think of anything more trivial than quarks, quasars, big bangs and black holes.”

— Tom Stoppard

192. “I smoke too much whether it’s going well or badly. After all these years, I definitely associate having a pen in my hand with having an ashtray just out of eye line.”

— Tom Stoppard

193. “It was a different planet in 1967, the Broadway theatre. It had a little ashtray clamped to the back of every seat and the author got 10% of the gross.”

— Tom Stoppard

194. “People do terrible things to each other, but it’s worse in the places where everybody is kept in the dark.”

— Tom Stoppard

195. “If everything from the furthest planet to the smallest atom of our brain acts according to Newton’s law of motion, what becomes of free will?”

— Tom Stoppard

196. “On Broadway, only the fire doors separate you from the sidewalk and you’re lucky if the sound of a police car doesn’t rip the envelope twice a night.”

— Tom Stoppard

197. “Left to themselves people are noble, generous, uncorrupted, they’d create a completely new kind of society if only people weren’t so blind, stupid and selfish.”

— Tom Stoppard

198. “The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy.”

— Tom Stoppard

199. “There we were – demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance – and every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. Don’t you see?! We’re actors – we’re the opposite of people!”

— Tom Stoppard

200. “I like plays where people talk a lot. Conversation is sustained. Argument is sustained.”

— Tom Stoppard