Tom Stoppard
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.Collection: Responsibility
Carnal embrace is sexual congress, which is the insertion of the male genital organ into the female genital organ for purposes of procreation and pleasure. Fermat’s last theorem, by contrast, asserts that when x, y and z are whole numbers each raised to power of n, the sum of the first two can never equal the third when n is greater than 2.Collection: Sex
When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?Collection: Thinking
Real data is messy. ...It's all very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it's playing your song, but unfortunately it's out of whack, some of the strings are missing, and the pianist is tone deaf and drunk- I mean, the noise! Impossible!Collection: Song
It takes character to withstand the rigours of indolence.Collection: Character
What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?Collection: Book
I'm going to be dead before I read the books I'm going to read.Collection: Book
A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma.Collection: Giving
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.Collection: Writing
They loved, and quarreled, and made up, and loved, and fought, and were true to each other and untrue. She made him the happiest man in the whole world and the most wretched, and after a few years she died, and then, when he was thirty, he died, too. But by that time Catullus had invented the love poem.Collection: Men
I shall have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love, love, love, above all. Love as there has never been in a play. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture.Collection: Heart
We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there's only one direction. And time is its only measure.Collection: One Direction
Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn't death! You scream and choke and sink to your knees but it doesn't bring death home to anyone- it doesn't catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says- 'One day you are going to die.Collection: Home
Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light.Collection: Light
Traitors hoist by their own petard?--or victims of the gods?--we shall never know!Collection: Victim
You can't treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires.Collection: People
Seduced her? Every time I turned round she was up a library ladder. In the end I gave in. That reminds me—I spotted something between her legs that made me think of you.Collection: Thinking
Rosencrantz: Shouldn't we be doing something--constructive? Guildenstern: What did you have in mind? ... A short, blunt human pyramid...?Collection: Pyramids
We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.Collection: School
I've lost all capacity for disbelief. I'm not sure that I could even rise to a little gentle scepticism.Collection: Littles
Save the gerund and screw the whale.Collection: Writing
the natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. strangely enough it all works out in the end... it's a mystery.Collection: Work Out
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.Collection: War
Biography is the mesh through which real life escapes.Collection: Real
ROS: Why don't you go and have a look? GUIL: Pragmatism?! - is that all you have to offer?Collection: Looks
No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.Collection: Imperfect Things
Every age thinks it's the modern age, but this one really is. Electricity is going to change everything. Everything!Collection: Thinking
It's silly to be depressed by it. I mean one thinks of it like being alive in a box, one keeps forgetting to take into account the fact that one is dead, which should make all the difference, shouldn't it? I mean, you'd never know you were in a box would you?... Even taking into account the fact that you're dead, it isn't a pleasant thought. Especially if you're dead, really. Ask yourself, if I asked you straight off-- I'm going to stuff you in this box now would you rather be alive or dead? Naturally you'd prefer to be alive. Life in a box is better than no life at all.Collection: Silly
No problem is insoluble, given a big enough plastic bag.Collection: Bags
Uncertainty is the normal state.Collection: Normal
Death is the ultimate negative.Collection: Negative
Well, we'll know better next time.Collection: Next
Let me get it straight. Your father was king. You were his only son. Your father dies. You are of age. Your uncle becomes king." "Yes." "Unorthodox.Collection: Kings
Act first! The ideas will follow, and if not - well, it's progressCollection: Ideas
Suicide is no more than a trick played on the calendar.Collection: Suicide
GUIL: A scientific approach to the examination of phenomena is a defence against the pure emotion of fearCollection: Fear
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; in his two-fold security.Collection: Dream
The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices—after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people's.Collection: People
Each move is dictated by the previous one--that is the meaning of orderCollection: Moving
It's not so much that I enjoy screenwriting, though mostly I do, but the difference is, with adaptations, somebody else has done the hard part - made up a story, provided the characters.Collection: Character
I really enjoy working on adaptations.Collection: Adaptation
I don't really have a system or set of principles. It's kind of common sense mixed up with instinct.Collection: Common Sense
I really love being in postproduction. First of all, it's all quite self-interested: You can protect things.Collection: Love Is
Once rehearsals are done the writer really doesn't have a function on the set. If the script is stabilized, then the writer becomes a celebrity tourist visiting the set, trying not to get in the way. It's very good for the ego, to go visit a film set if you are the writer, because they give you a special chair, and tell you where you can sit to watch the monitor. They make you feel special, but at the same time, they make it perfectly plain that you are irrelevant!Collection: Giving
Most British playwrights of my generation, as well as younger folks, apparently feel somewhat obliged to Russian literature - and not only those writing for theatres. Russian literature is part of the basic background knowledge for any writer. So there is nothing exceptional in the interest I had towards Russian literature and theatre. Frankly, I couldn't image what a culture would be like without sympathy towards Russian literature and Russia, whether we'd be talking about drama or Djagilev.Collection: Drama
You always end up with too much, so it's good to be part of the conversation about not just what you can omit, but how you are going to do the grammar of the omission, how you make things continue to work when there's something missing. It's your last chance to rewrite.Collection: Omission
Normally, even if you're on the set for 12 hours, there may be only a moment or two when you are actually useful.Collection: Two
One of the nice things about the world of filmmaking is that you make friends in the business.Collection: Nice
To be frank: the translations that often sound bad in the mouths of the actors, these have often been done by linguists.Collection: Sound