Tom Stoppard
I began writing for theater, and maybe because of that I've always thought of myself as a theater writer who does work in film sometimes.Collection: Writing
Having translated two plays by Chekhov, and not speaking Russian myself - I cannot say one sentence. This may shock people... However, I am not shocked, as it is not hard to find out what the words mean.Collection: Mean
The days of the digitals are numbered. The metaphor is built into them like a self-destruct mechanism.Collection: Science
What did you have in mind? A short, blunt human pyramid?Collection: Pyramids
I didn't feel good about cutting out parts of very famous speeches, ... You think you somehow need all of it or you get none of it, but that's not true.Collection: Cutting
Hell is very likely to be modernization infinitely extended.Collection: Hell
can only write about what bites you.Collection: Writing
In England the rich own the poor and the men own the women.Collection: Men
There is no one so radical as a man-servant whose freedom of the champagne bin has been interfered with.Collection: Men
Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight. Equilibrium is pragmatic. You have to get everything into proportion. You compensate, rebalance yourself so that you maintain your angle to your world. When the world shifts, you shift.Collection: Balance
I enjoy writing dialogue; it comes naturally to me.Collection: Writing
It's probably unprecedented for a filmmaker simply to take the writers' script and treat it as the instructions on the package. What really happens is you pretty much suppress your own instincts - and your own views on the matter - and write things the way filmmakers would like to have them, though the filmmakers often don't know what they want. They can only find out by reading what you do.Collection: Reading
My scripts are possibly too talkative.Collection: Scripts
I have to go with what I do, and what I do has more to do with what people say to each other than telling a story through images. Of course, you're trying to do both. And there are some people who are brilliant at it, but I don't consider myself to be particularly good at it. My mind gets into a verbal mode.Collection: People
My mind gets into a verbal mode.Collection: Mind
He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.Collection: Doe
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!Collection: Children
A circle is the longest distance to same point.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: Eye
Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway. Guildenstern: What? Rosencrantz: England. Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?Collection: Believe
...Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that what is taken to be true. It's the currency if living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions. What do you assume?Collection: Taken
Autumnal -- nothing to do with leaves. It is to do with a certain brownness at the edges of the day ... Brown is creeping up on us, take my word for it ... Russets and tangerine shades of old gold flushing the very outside edge of the senses... deep shining ochres, burnt umber and parchments of baked earth -- reflecting on itself and through itself, filtering the light. At such times, perhaps, coincidentally, the leaves might fall, somewhere, by repute. Yesterday was blue, like smoke.Collection: Fall
I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.Collection: Children
A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.Collection: Men
Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?Collection: Optimistic
I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.Collection: Writing
Personally I am in favour of education but a university is not the place for it.Collection: Education
Maybe Napoleon was wrong when he said we were a nation of shopkeepers... Today England looked like a nation of goalkeepers.Collection: Goalkeepers
People think there's a choice between smoking and immortality, but we've all got to die of something.Collection: Thinking
We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.Collection: Integrity
We drift down time, clutching at straws. But what good's a brick to a drowning man?Collection: Men
All mystical experience is coincidence; and vice versa, of course.Collection: Mystical Experiences
It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.Collection: Alive
Your opinions are your symptoms.Collection: Opinion
When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.Collection: Mystery
Give us this day our daily mask.Collection: Bible
The results of the divorce between truth and human beings can be most graphically observed in politics.Collection: Divorce
Fantasy flows in where fact leaves a vacuum.Collection: Writing
Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over... Death is not anything... death is not... It's the absence of presence, nothing more... the endless time of never coming back... a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes not sound.Collection: Death
We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. but there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.Collection: Fall
Pirates could happen to anyone.Collection: Pirate
The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody.Collection: Real
I'm the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal and rebut the refutation. Endlessly.Collection: Issues
What a fine persecution—to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.Collection: Enlightened
Sometimes people are so close to the material, they miss an important cross-reference. You can't drop this line because half an hour later, it affects that line. And the writer is the person who knows that immediately.Collection: People
The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.Collection: Coffee
Before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself.Collection: Plato
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.Collection: Party
I can put two and two together, you know. Do not think you are dealing with a man who has lost his grapes.Collection: Work