Top 200 Tom Stoppard Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness.”

— Tom Stoppard

202. “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

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

— Tom Stoppard

204. “The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.”

— Tom Stoppard

205. “Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does.”

— Tom Stoppard

206. “I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven’t got a play cooking.”

— Tom Stoppard

207. “I’m going to be dead before I read the books I’m going to read.”

— Tom Stoppard

208. “I doubt that art needed Ruskin any more than a moving train needs one of its passengers to shove it.”

— Tom Stoppard

209. “No, no, no... you’ve got it all wrong... you can’t act death. The fact of it is nothing to do with seeing it happen – it’s not gasps and blood and falling about – that isn’t what makes it death. It’s just a man failing to reappear, that’s all – now you see him, now you don’t, that the only thing that’s real: here one minute and gone the next and never coming back – an exit, unobtrusive and unannounced, a disappearance gathering weight as it goes on, until, finally, it is heavy with death.”

— Tom Stoppard

210. “If we can’t arrange our own happiness, it’s a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us.”

— Tom Stoppard

211. “James Joyce – an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.”

— Tom Stoppard

212. “For 10 years of my life, 3 times a day, I thanked the Lord for what I was about to receive and thanked him again for what I had just received, and then we lost touch and I suddenly thought, where is he now.”

— Tom Stoppard

213. “We’re better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it’ll rain on auntie’s garden party three Sundays from now.”

— Tom Stoppard

214. “Fantasy flows in where fact leaves a vacuum.”

— Tom Stoppard

215. “The days of the digitals are numbered. The metaphor is built into them like a self-destruct mechanism.”

— Tom Stoppard

216. “Any revival in which I am involved is liable to change.”

— Tom Stoppard

217. “I’ve got no interest in educating or instructing people.”

— Tom Stoppard

218. “I know the British press is very attached to the lobby system. It lets the journalists and the politicians feel proud of their traditional freedoms while giving the reader as much of the truth as they think is good for him.”

— Tom Stoppard

219. “When people discuss his plays, he says that he feels like he’s standing at customs watching an official ransack his luggage. He cheerfully declares responsibility for a play about two people, and suddenly the officer is finding all manner of exotic contraband like the nature of God and identity, and while he can’t deny that they’re there, he can’t for the life of him remember putting them there. In the end, a play is not the product of an idea; an idea is the product of a play.”

— Tom Stoppard

220. “I don’t write at the library, because I smoke when I work or would like the possibility of a smoke. Also, I need to be at my own desk.”

— Tom Stoppard

221. “I write fiction because it’s a way of making statements I can disown.”

— Tom Stoppard

222. “I don’t act, I don’t direct, I don’t design.”

— Tom Stoppard

223. “I’ve seldom minded other people’s opinions, but the other side of that coin is that I’ve seldom been interested by them, um their opinions about me I mean.”

— Tom Stoppard

224. “The causes we know everything about depend on causes we know very little about which depend upon causes we know absolutely nothing about.”

— Tom Stoppard

225. “I write scenes – often quite long scenes – mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.”

— Tom Stoppard

226. “Theater is a recreation. It can be much more, but unless it’s recreation, I don’t see the point of it.”

— Tom Stoppard

227. “HANNAH: Don’t let Bernard get to you. It’s only performance art, you know. Rhetoric, they used to teach it in ancient times, like PT. It’s not about being right, they had philosophy for that. Rhetoric was their chat show. Bernard’s indignation is a sort of aerobics for when he gets on television.”

— Tom Stoppard

228. “To be frank: the translations that often sound bad in the mouths of the actors, these have often been done by linguists.”

— Tom Stoppard

229. “Poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship. There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don’t like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical to ours.”

— Tom Stoppard

230. “I can’t remember what my first script was.”

— Tom Stoppard

231. “As a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas. I have no illusions about that.”

— Tom Stoppard

232. “As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don’t know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.”

— Tom Stoppard

233. “I was delighted to not go to university. I couldn’t wait to be out of education.”

— Tom Stoppard

234. “So it is with us all, we’re not so one-or-the-other. The one who puts on the clothes in the morning is the working majority, but at night-perhaps in the moment before unconsciousness- we meet our sleeper- the priest is visited by the doubter, the Marxist sees the civilizing force of the bourgeoisie, the captain of the industry admits the justice of common ownership.”

— Tom Stoppard

235. “I feel overestimated.”

— Tom Stoppard

236. “Can’t you function unless you’re losing?”

— Tom Stoppard

237. “In England the rich own the poor and the men own the women.”

— Tom Stoppard

238. “Theater is still a medium which attracts young writers. You’d think that it would be all over by now, with television and film. But it’s not.”

— Tom Stoppard

239. “Mr Hodge, ignorance should be like an empty vessel waiting to be filled at the well of truth – not a cabinet of vulgar curios.”

— Tom Stoppard

240. “Gallons of ink and miles of typewriter ribbon expended on the misery of the unrequited lover; not a word about the utter tedium of the unrequiting.”

— Tom Stoppard

241. “My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.”

— Tom Stoppard

242. “Do not dabble in paradox, Edward, it puts you in danger of fortuitous wit.”

— Tom Stoppard

243. “As her tutor you have a duty to keep her in ignorance.”

— Tom Stoppard

244. “The rational is at the mercy of the irrational. Barbarism will not be eradicated by culture.”

— Tom Stoppard

245. “By why, Ligurinus, alas why this unaccustomed tear trickling down my cheek? – why does my glib tongue stumble to silence as I speak? At night I hold you fast in my dreams, I run after you across the Field of Mars, I follow you into the tumbling waters, and you show no pity.”

— Tom Stoppard

246. “Morality makes no difference legally.”

— Tom Stoppard

247. “How is a juggler you can’t hear or see or smell or touch different to no juggler at all?”

— Tom Stoppard

248. “He could not put down a word without suspecting that it might be the wrong one and that if he held back for another day the intermediate experience would provide the right one. There was no end to that, and Moon fearfully glimpsed himself as a pure writer who after a lifetime of absolutely no output whatsoever, would prepare on his deathbed the single sentence which was the distillation of everything he had saved up, and die before he was able to utter it.”

— Tom Stoppard

249. “No more you can, time must needs run backward, and since it will not, we must stir our way onward mixing as we go, disorder out of disorder into disorder until pink is complete, unchanging and unchangeable, and we are done with it for ever. This is known as free will or self-determination.”

— Tom Stoppard