I have a spasm of envy for the person that was killed by a falling bookcase, as long as it doesn't happen prematurely.
Tom Stoppard
Related
This is too much reality for a Friday.
AS GOOD AS IT GETS Only fools wait, and only tools bait.
CRE There are approximately two trillion cells in the human body. You are never alone, there are always ...
DWIGHT W. HAYES It doesn't matter how precisely the onion is cut as long as the person chewing it is happy.
PADMA LAKSHMI As a jobbing actor, I never get a script and go 'I can't be bothered with this.' Life do...
EVE MYLES It's of very little importance to me that I was born gay. It doesn't make me a better athlet...
JOHNNY WEIR I've always tried to defend the idea that the blues doesn't have to be sung by a person who ...
B. B. KING In Cloud computing the difference between a dark cloud and a cloud with a silver lining, is the part...
RAJAT MOHAN A lot of teenagers write to me and say "I want to write a book. I want to get published." And those ...
MAUREEN JOHNSON Nature creates while destroying, and doesn't care whether it creates or destroys as long as life...
IVAN TURGENEV As a person, I was born to give out my opinions. By giving out my opinions, I realize who I am. As l...
AI WEIWEI Anyone can see how if a feared tax hike doesn't happen, that's a positive factor. But even i...
KENNETH FISHER I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy - I don'...
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR. I've made a kind of pact with myself where I said, It doesn't matter what it is as long as I...
DAN CASTELLANETA As a Christian, Christ died so that we will have eternal life in Him in Heaven. What it looks like d...
T. D. JAKES Frankly, any city person who doesn't think I deserve a white-collar salary as a farmer doesn'...
JOEL SALATIN A constant stream of 'free' money is a perfect way to keep an inefficient or simply bad gove...
DAMBISA MOYO I have a natural right to do whatever I want with my body... as long as it doesn't affect anybod...
JACK KEVORKIAN Would you want you as a friend?
PETER STROPLE It should not be surprised by seeing in our weird world that the people for enjoying own bread can a...
ANUJ SOMANY Everyone out there is using you for their entertainment and what you mostly need is to be entertainm...
SUPERNA BATHEJA Years and years ago, there was a production of The Tempest, out of doors, at an Oxford college on a ...
TOM STOPPARD I don't really care if people think I'm good-looking or not; it doesn't define me as a p...
GENESIS RODRIGUEZ It ends or it doesn't.
That’s what you say. That’s
how you get through it.
The tu...
CAITLYN SIEHL I mean, as long as it doesn't have a bra attached, guys can take a risk and wear stylish things ...
STEVEN TYLER The crowd doesn't give a crap as long as you bring the money in.
GUY LAFLEUR Success doesn't happen in a vacuum. You're only as good as the people you work with and the ...
CASEY KASEM I never see myself as the famous person. It never was a part of my life, and I hope this doesn't...
AYELET ZURER The average user doesn't give a damn what happens, as long as (1) it works and (2) it's fast...
DANIEL J. BERNSTEIN Age doesn't mean anything. Age doesn't mean I can't work as hard. Age doesn't mean I...
ZENDAYA I can work in films as long as the story doesn't have a realistic nature. If I'm working wit...
MANUEL PUIG I'm very much a believer in the character always heading for something or after something. But t...
MONICA DOLAN (All the grief she had suffered over her lifetime had moulded her face into a mask of eternal sadnes...
JEAN SASSON But I it doesn't matter who scores the goals so long as we win.
STEVEN GERRARD I have bursts of being a lady, but it doesn't last long.
SHELLEY WINTERS To be honest, I am somebody that, as long as I have a character, it doesn't really matter if it&...
HANNAH TOINTON I like Mitt Romney as a person. I think he's a dignified person. But I have no common ground on ...
RON PAUL I do what I do to inspire people. They can't be inspired by an ego, a big-headed person. It does...
LA'PORSHA RENAE The part of capitalism that doesn't work for me is when capitalists make decisions in the way th...
DANNY MEYER I would probably, in my 60s, be ready to start having kids, as long as I was spared all the stuff ab...
GEOFF DYER Sometimes I wonder if there is something about my family which invites violence. 'Is it envy,...
ROSE KENNEDY Landing a million-dollar investment for your startup is exhilarating. But as big as that number soun...
RYAN HOLMES I make films about black women and it doesn't mean that you can't see them as a black man, d...
AVA DUVERNAY As long as we are engaged in storytelling that moves the culture forward, it doesn't matter what...
LEVAR BURTON Jesse Jackson is a master of the old expression that it doesn't matter what someone says about y...
MIKE GALLAGHER What I learned from doing 'The Graduate' was it doesn't matter what the medium is... as ...
ALICIA SILVERSTONE It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.
DENG XIAOPING Weight doesn't matter as long as you're happy with yourself.
BILLIE PIPER I happen to go for the simplest, most ordinary things. The extraordinary doesn't interest me. I&...
JOHN HUGHES People in the U.K. share my bemusement with the United States that America doesn't share with it...
BILL HICKS Because I believe in God and have faith in God, it doesn't mean I am immortal. It doesn't me...
AYRTON SENNA I'm going to go to school. It doesn't matter what the outcome is as long as I did it. I can ...
TATYANA ALI That's SHIT!
How do you remove it?
You just put it inside the trash, easy as that.
DEYTH BANGER I don't think of the characters as being good or bad because that doesn't help me as a write...
BRYAN COGMAN I'm only two years older than Brad Pitt, but I look a lot older, which used to greatly frustrate...
GEORGE CLOONEY I'm not a blokey bloke. I don't take myself too seriously. But that doesn't stop me bein...
TOM ELLIS I had such a big mouth for so long that it doesn't faze anybody anymore.
BILLY CORGAN I had a real good thing going for me, and I got sidetracked. It doesn't have to be that way. It ...
KEN CAMINITI I'm learning what I gotta do to get people hyped up. It doesn't matter even if they're n...
KEVIN FEDERLINE I robbed them, and I killed them as cold as ice, and I would do it again, and I know I would kill an...
AILEEN WUORNOS We admire virtue in a woman as long as it doesnt get in our way.
SACHA GUITRY I would do 'John Carter' again tomorrow. I'm very proud of 'John Carter.' Box of...
TAYLOR KITSCH The fact that a terrorist was killed, and it doesn't matter if it was in Dubai or Gaza, is good ...
TZIPI LIVNI If you fall during your life, it doesn't matter. You're never a failure as long as you try t...
EVEL KNIEVEL A picador is the guy in a bullfight who helps make sure the matador doesn't get killed by distra...
CHRISTOPHER LLOYD I don't mind fighting as long as it's for a good cause.
KEN CUCCINELLI It doesn't matter what you believe just so long as you're sincere.
CHARLES M. SCHULZ The answer isn't more time but a greater awareness of the time we have.
CRAIG GROESCHEL As long as the food is well prepared and not overdone, I think it tastes good. It doesn't matter...
MARTIN YAN I want everybody to succeed. It's just part of who I am. I probably do that with my kids tenfold...
LISA RINNA Music doesn't really require whether the person's a young person or old person for whatever ...
LEON REDBONE I've been bisexual for as long as I can remember. I remember being made fun of in junior high fo...
CRYSTAL BOWERSOX As long as you're having fun and still doing stuff, it doesn't matter what other people thin...
NICK CARTER I'm thought of as a celebrity. Everything I've ever done... has been for children. As long a...
JACK WILD That's what was so amazing about 'Mulan.' Here is this story with all Chinese characters...
MING-NA WEN I believe in soulmates, yes, but I believe you also have to work at love. I happen to believe your s...
CHERYL COLE I feel it's important to show that one thing that you do doesn't define you as a human being...
RYAN GOSLING It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Tech...
JACKSON POLLOCK Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular...
HENRY JAMES I don't have a desire for material things. As long as I'm happy, I'm good, man.
ASTRO Look, I think the worst case scenario is obvious. I think first of all it doesn't work for very ...
STEPHEN HARPER Just because you haven't got a home, doesn't make you homeless.
and
Just because you don't...
ANTHONY T. HINCKS If you do hit someone, it could be as bad as reckless homicide if the person is killed by that.
SGT. JUDY PHILLIPS 'The Sopranos' all came down to the writing. I wouldn't have been on for as long as I wa...
JAMES GANDOLFINI In the life of any actor or actress, there is inevitably a time when they will be eligible to act in...
ED STOPPARD I sort of wrongfully judged 'Mamma Mia!' for so long. I thought of it as a jukebox musical t...
AARON LAZAR A convert, if he converts through the Orthodox, he has the Jewish gene. If he doesn't convert th...
ELI YISHAI The Jews were gassed. Armenians were killed in every conceivable way... So the Holocaust doesn't...
JACK KEVORKIAN Whether it's at a concert in France or a restaurant in the United States, terrorism doesn't ...
BILL GOLDBERG A person of value have skill, a vision & a deep desire to achieve what they dream for. Happiness com...
DR ANIL KUMAR SINHA I am often asked how it is that I am able to value people to such a deep degree. Apparently, I exhib...
C. JOYBELL C. It doesn't matter that millions read as long as you share it with somebody. So I don't reall...
CAROLYN CHUTE Young people have decided they like to listen to music in a certain way, through ear buds, and that&...
PRINCE As far as Gary Johnson is concerned, he is not a credible person on foreign policy. We need somebody...
EVAN MCMULLIN I think a lot of people have lost respect for the individual, you know, the individual, the person w...
ERYKAH BADU I've been in this business so long, it just doesn't faze me. I know what's going to happ...
DUSTIN DIAMOND It's an open secret that if a debtor is willing to wait long enough, he can probably get away wi...
CHARLES DUHIGG 'Envy the Night' was my first stand alone, the first book I'd written in the third perso...
MICHAEL KORYTA I'm really troubled by the prevalence of single-sport specializations. I want my kids to do as m...
DOUGLAS BRUNT It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars.
GARRISON KEILLOR
More Tom Stoppard
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 When I was younger, I could do something useful just by being free for half a day, but now I need fi...
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 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