Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are...condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one - that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it'll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of their order, we'd know that we were lost. A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty - and, by which definition, a philosopher - dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; his two-fold security.


Tom Stoppard

  Email Quote to Friends   Link to Quote   Create Short URL  Publish Text About This Quote   Share on Facebook, Twitter, and more
  See Recommended Quotes For You

Related

A chinese philosopher once had a dream that he was a butterfly. From that day on, he was never quite...
UNKNOWN
35. God is entitled to a portion of our income—not because He needs it but because we need to give...
JAMES C. DOBSON
Each move is dictated by the previous one--that is the meaning of order
TOM STOPPARD
I believe that there is a Matrix and... to be more accurate I am in the Pornography Matrix.
DEYTH BANGER
I like the word 'fuck'. The word means what it means, but it also means whatever you need it to mean...
LISA GLATT
The answer isn't more time but a greater awareness of the time we have.
CRAIG GROESCHEL
His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At on...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
They were talking more distantly than if they were strangers who had just met, for if they had been ...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
And if Amsterdam was hell, and if hell was a memory, then he realized that perhaps there was some pu...
PAUL AUSTER
Life is not interested in good and evil. Don Quixote was constantly choosing between good and evil, ...
WILLIAM FAULKNER
If Stephen King was a killer, he will be the best killer ever existed, check out his novels, check o...
DEYTH BANGER
We saw Elvis, and he was so happy to see us. And he loved the whole idea that we were going to run a...
CONNIE STEVENS
When it's clear that we have a commitment to God that comes before anything else in our lives, most ...
CRAIG GROESCHEL
Once I dreamed I was a butterfly, and now I no longer know whether I am Chuang Tzu, who dreamed I wa...
CHUANG TZU
Christ was treated as we deserve, that we might be treated as He deserves. He was condemned for our ...
ELLEN G. WHITE
Anyways, that very same night there was a fight in the casino on B Deck. Some of the passengers got ...
CHRISTINA ENGELA
They were really getting quite fond of their strange pet and hoped that Aslan would allow them to ke...
C.S. LEWIS
He said that we belonged together because he was born with a flower and I was born with a butterfly ...
GEMMA MALLEY
He had said that our lives are steered by uncertainties, many of which are disruptive or even daunti...
AMOR TOWLES
He's still Phil, and we love him. He was an important part of our congregation and one of the things...
JOE KELLY
I realized that day that blessings come in a variety of shapes, colors, and sizes.
CRAIG GROESCHEL
And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, / If a soul sin, and commit a trespass against the LORD, and ...
BIBLE
He was no lover in a worldly sense; the only love he knew was that of divine understanding, of takin...
DEZSő KOSZTOLáNYI
If it was just me and Elvis one on one, which only happened once or twice in the times that I did se...
MAC DAVIS
His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one ti...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
The idea that he is haunted by what humans do — I just loved that irony because we are all so afrai...
MARKUS ZUSAK
We live aware of God moment by moment. He is not part of our lives; He is our life.
CRAIG GROESCHEL
To the spiritual perplexity which exercised so many of the rarest souls of the nineteenth century, G...
JOHN BAILLIE
Scott was punk rock and basically we were just worried about his health. We got kind of midway throu...
BRANDON THOMAS
(Terrero) played a nice game yesterday. Unfortunately, he gets the highlight because of what happene...
BOB MELVIN
If he was away getting something he needed or having a meal, he wouldn't be under the rubble, but we...
RUBEN ESCUDERO
Empathy is the new measurement of everything. It doesn't matter what religion you have, what God you...
C. JOYBELL C.
When we see the face of God we shall know that we have always known it. He has been a party to, has ...
C.S. LEWIS
If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintell...
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Feast of Catherine of Siena, Mystic, Teacher, 1380 He has loved us without being loved... We are b...
CATHERINE OF SIENA
38. “A wet bird never flies at night.” (My grandfather said that to me when I was a child and wa...
JAMES C. DOBSON
He thought I was just ignoring him, ... I told him that if I had gotten the letter, of course I woul...
MITCH ALBOM
Commemoration of Katherine of Alexandria, Martyr, 4th century "The Law", he says, "was our 'pedag...
C. H. DODD
Chris proposed exactly the way I've always dreamed. Our families were close by, but it was just ...
HILLARY SCOTT
He had an effective removal order against him, he had a legal deportation order against him, there w...
JANIS FERGUSSON
He didn’t know if that was really true or not, but he discovered something which was tremendously ...
STEPHEN KING
I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who ...
ZHUANGZI
I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who ...
CHUANG TZU
Obviously he can do a lot by himself. I thought we did a decent job defensively on him. He got what ...
ED PATRICK
Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for a moment, that God, who made these deservin...
C.S. LEWIS
He was arrested as a result of a call from our tips line. We do know that he was moving around quite...
HOWARD SAFIR
Stairs to climb are difficult it takes time and effort and going down is easies job... what do I mea...
DEYTH BANGER
He was looking amazing. He was feeling amazing and I think it was just wonderful to have him back on...
KARAN JOHAR
We knew that they were a good team, I don?t think we underestimated them at all. It was just a fight...
BARBARA TURNER
We use the word cross in our hymns, in our piety, in our prayers, and in our pastoral language. But ...
JOHN HOWARD YODER
[Then the earth began shaking at Warner Bros.] We just had a wonderful team there, ... But it's just...
HEIDI NEWFIELD
Was it possible to feel nostalgic about something that had never happened to him, possible for nosta...
ASHIM SHANKER
That was crucial and I thought we really got caught in the emotion of that. We had just hit a three ...
DENNIS BRADLEY
The Ephebians believed that every man should have the vote (provided that he wasn't poor, foreign, n...
TERRY PRATCHETT
My own participation in the campaign was delayed by the death of my son Calvin, which occurred on th...
CALVIN COOLIDGE
We know that could have been any of us, and it's just really unfortunate that it happened to him. We...
JACK KRAMER
The Imperial Senate, ever conscious of the weight of public opinion resting on the tip of the pencil...
CHRISTINA ENGELA
We believe that there is possibly one. We do have a witness who says he did speak to the driver of t...
ROB ROGERS
Convinced that we're living the whole time that we're dying.
We decide to go out walking the wh...
TEGAN QUIN
Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purp...
ZHUANGZI
Ali was at almost every practice we had. So when he wasn't there that night we thought it was strang...
GENE BARBER
His existence had always been comfortable, he had always held a clear picture of himself, his duties...
NEAL SHUSTERMAN
She wasn't bitter. She was sad, though. But it was a hopeful kind of sad. The kind of sad that just ...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
So, I guess we are who we are for alot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
I love my mom so much. I don't care if that's corny to say. I think on my next birthday, I'm going t...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
We Are All Infinite
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
You can't just sit there and put everyone's lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You ...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
I saw other people there. Old men sitting alone. Young girls with blue eye shadow and awkward jaws. ...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
That one moment when you know you are not a sad story. You are ALIVE.
STEPHAN CHBOSKY
Somos quienes somos por un montón de razones.Quizás nunca conozcamos la mayoría de ellas.Pero aun...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
Ambos dijeron que tomara asiento y parecían hablar en serio, así que me senté.
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
I know these will all be stories some day, and our pictures will become old photographs. We all beco...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
So I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybewe'll never know most of them.
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
So I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them.
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
There's nothing like the deep breathes after laughing that hard. Nothing in the world like a sore st...
STHEPHEN CHBOSKY
no more pencils, no more books, no more teachers' dirty looks, when the teacher rings the bell, drop...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
I don't know the significance of this, but I find it very interesting.
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
Maybe it’s sad that these are now memories. And maybe it’s not sad.
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
This so gnawed at him on some nights that he lay awake wondering just how many unknown and similarly...
LOUISE ERDRICH
It was a cold morning, and he shivered a little; but he had been taught by his uncle that his prayer...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
I think the most important thing that happened to us the whole time we were here was more recent — ...
JANETTE LOW
We talked at half time saying we wanted to have to make them come back two points at a time. Not one...
DAN SCHWIETERMAN
In the days of His earthly ministry, only those could speak to him who came where He was: if He was ...
WILLIAM TEMPLE
Even if Zuma was to develop the authoritarian impulses of a Mugabe, he would be checked—not least ...
MARK GEVISSER
I asked Raghav, as we were looking over the wasteland, if the Muslims they burnt would beg for their...
SUKETU MEHTA
...He was a greater craftsman even than Isaac, and he knew it, and so, presently, did Isaac.
ELIZABETH GOUDGE
You must save what you can of your life; you musn't lose it all simply because you've lost a part.
HENRY JAMES
I just sort of take it from a character perspective, and I don't know if he was necessarily spiritua...
RYAN GOSLING
If he was not exactly a Spartan, he was, you might say, spartanatical. Things happened to you; they ...
A.E. COPPARD
He tried to remember Moon Child's eyes, but was no longer able to. He was sure of only one thing: th...
MICHAEL ENDE
That's why we seize the moment try to freeze it and own it, squeeze it and hold it.
EMINEM
Most of us think we're too busy or too important to rest for a day.
CRAIG GROESCHEL
We just felt that our start was going to be real important because this was their fourth game in fou...
MARC HABSCHEID
He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike pur...
JONATHAN FRANZEN
The company had virtually shut down operations in Jackson by that time. They were no longer sending ...
LARRY BUTLER
The evil components of our shadow are the part of us that we deplore, the part of us that we prefer ...
KILROY J. OLDSTER
I asked him if he was going to do the bidding of the mayor and I was pretty satisfied with his answe...
DAVID BLOOM
Our Prophet was a radical too- he fought against the injustices of his community and challenged the ...
ABU BAKAR BASHIR
One player doesn't make a team - although Ahmad is a unique player [and] he is different from the re...
CLINT SINTIM
He reminded me of one of those adventure seekers on TV. He hadn’t shaved in a few days at least, a...
JESSICA FORTUNATO

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
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 have a spasm of envy for the person that was killed by a falling bookcase, as long as it doesn'...
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