Tom Stoppard
If I had been asked to write 1,200 words for a newspaper tomorrow, on any subject, I would just do it rather than leave a white hole in the page. And I think it's a very healthy attitude to take to writing anything.Collection: Attitude
I don't act, I don't direct, I don't design.Collection: Design
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.Collection: Beauty
Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.Collection: Chance
Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.Collection: Age
My intention still is to write a play to commemorate, possibly rather skeptically, the 50th anniversary of the Russian revolution. I started it at the beginning of 1966, but confronted with the enormous importance and reality of that revolution, I absolutely boggle. I don't know what to do about it.Collection: Anniversary
I want to support the whole idea of the humanities and teaching the humanities as being something that - even if it can't be quantitatively measured as other subjects - it's as fundamental to all education.Collection: Education
I think I give the impression of being a romantic, and I think inside I'm quite severe. But some might say they had the opposite impression of me.Collection: Romantic
Like almost everything else from the West, the Romantic Revolution arrived late in Russia.Collection: Romantic
I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.Collection: Change
Every exit is an entry somewhere else.Collection: Motivational
A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.Collection: Attitude
I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.Collection: Age
It is no light matter to put in jeopardy a single life when it is the very singularity of each life which underpins the idea of a just society.Collection: Society
It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.Collection: Art
All your life, you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.Collection: Truth
I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.Collection: Respect
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.Collection: Imagination
Chekhov was capable of casually tossing off deplorable comments in his letters, combined with a very modern anger against anti-Semitism.Collection: Anger
If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music and of aviation.Collection: Age
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.Collection: Birthday
For me, human rights simply endorse a view of life and a set of moral values that are perfectly clear to an eight-year-old child. A child knows what is fair and isn't fair, and justice derives from that knowledge.Collection: Knowledge
It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.Collection: Government
If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.
Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.
Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.
When I was younger, I could do something useful just by being free for half a day, but now I need five days to get the world I've left out of my head and ten days or a fortnight not talking to anyone to hold what I need to hold inside my head.
Life is a gamble, at terrible odds - if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.
Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
Good things, when short, are twice as good.
We're actors. We're the opposite of people.
Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?
A free press needs to be a respected press.
Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.
If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice.
I don't feel that I belong anywhere. Or rather, if there's a place I belong, I don't feel I'm there.
Life in a box is better than no life at all... I expect.
I'm offended by things and take pathetic little stands against them.
Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.
Obviously, you would give your life for your children, or give them the last biscuit on the plate. But to me, the trick in life is to take that sense of generosity between kin, make it apply to the extended family and to your neighbour, your village and beyond.
The whole notion of journalism being an institution whose fundamental purpose is to educate and inform and even, one might say, elevate, has altered under commercial pressure, perhaps, into a different kind of purpose, which is to divert and distract and entertain.
Time is short, life is short, there's a lot to know. So I skip the entertainers in the newspaper now. I just haven't got time.
Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.
I've voted in every election - not always for the same political party and never with any degree of enthusiasm.
When I was a reporter in Bristol, which I was between the years 1954 and 1960, the newspaper would get tickets for whoever showed up to play a gig at the big hall down the road, so I saw some wonderful people. The Everly Brothers, for example.
I was an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values against which art could be measured. I didn't trust my own subjective responses.
I like pop music. I consider rock 'n' roll to be a branch of pop music.
The text loses its virginity simply by being staged: it's no longer the abstract ideal version; it's an event.
I don't think falling in love in Slovakia is much different from falling in love in Tunbridge Wells.
I have a spasm of envy for the person that was killed by a falling bookcase, as long as it doesn't happen prematurely.