Tom Stoppard
Underneath runs the main current of preoccupation, which is keeping one's nose clean at all times. This means that when things go wrong you have to pass the blame along the line, like pass-the-parcel, till the music stops.Collection: Running
To say that it is without pace, point, focus, interest, drama, wit or originality is to say simply that it does not happen to be my cup of tea.Collection: Drama
The idea that all the people locked up in mental hospitals are sane while all the people walking about are mad is merely a literary cliche, put about by people who should be locked up. I assure you there is not much in it. Taken as a whole, the sane are out there the sick are in here. For example you are in here because you have delusions that sane people are put in mental hospitals.Collection: Taken
I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus.Collection: Boulders
If knowledge isn't self-knowledge it isn't doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing 'When Father Painted the Parlour'? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you. 'She walks into beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that's best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.Collection: Father
Death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.Collection: World
Information is light. Information in itself, about anything, is light.Collection: Light
We've traveled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation.Collection: Time
If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could.Collection: Clever
The hard part is getting to the top of page 1.Collection: Crafts
War is capitalism with the gloves off and many who go to war know it but they go to war because they don't want to be a hero.Collection: Love
It seems pointless to be quoted if one isn't going to be quotable ... it's better to be quotable than honest.Collection: Honest
Chater: You dare to call me that. I demand satisfaction! Septimus: Mrs Chater demanded satisfaction and now you are demanding satisfaction. I cannot spend my time day and night satisfying the demands of the Chater family.Collection: Night
Audiences know what to expect, and that is all that they are prepared to believe in.Collection: Believe
It was precisely this notion of infinite series which in the sixth century BC led the Greek philosopher Zeno to conclude that since an arrow shot towards a target first had to cover half the distance, and then half the remainder, and then half the remainder after that, and so on ad infinitum, the result was, as I will now demonstrate, that though an arrow is always approaching its target, it never quite gets there, and Saint Sebastian died of fright.Collection: Distance
The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.Collection: Together
Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.Collection: Art
How the hell do I know what I find incredible? Credibility is an expanding field... Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight.Collection: Nodding
The names for things don't come first. Words stagger after, hopelessly trying to become the sensation.Collection: Names
I doubt that art needed Ruskin any more than a moving train needs one of its passengers to shove it.Collection: Art
A play that works well and is done quite a lot - I've never done the math - but it's probably more remunerative than a movie.Collection: Math
Sometimes directors feel a script needs something, but they're not sure what it is, so they show it to a friend; if the friend is a writer, he ends up kicking around with that script for a while.Collection: Directors
Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins.Collection: Junk
You are an over-excited little man, with a need for self-expression far beyond the scope of your natural gifts. This is not discreditable. Neither does it make you an artist.Collection: Artist
We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.Collection: Style
I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.Collection: Music
I smoke too much whether it's going well or badly. After all these years, I definitely associate having a pen in my hand with having an ashtray just out of eye line.Collection: Eye
I've never written an original piece for film; all the original things I've done are for the stage.Collection: Done
He's never known anything like it! But then, he has never known anything to write home about, so this is nothing to write home about.Collection: Home
Sometimes I watch a scene I've written, and occasionally I think, "Oh, for God's sake, shut up."Collection: Thinking
There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.Collection: Moments
There is presumably a calendar date a moment when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, secretly, the noes had it.Collection: Atheist
Writing a play is like smashing that [glass] ashtray, filming it in slow motion, and then running the film in reverse, so that the fragments of rubble appear to fly together. You start - or at least I start - with the rubble.Collection: Running
Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God's crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can't think of anything more trivial than quarks, quasars, big bangs and black holes.Collection: Thinking
Left to themselves people are noble, generous, uncorrupted, they'd create a completely new kind of society if only people weren't so blind, stupid and selfish.Collection: Selfish
Of all forms of fiction, autobiography is the most gratuitous.Collection: Fiction
The tragedy of journalism is that these are people doing their best work.Collection: People
The causes we know everything about depend on causes we know very little about, which depend on causes we know absolutely nothing about.Collection: Littles
Wars are fought for oil wells and coaling stations; for control of the Dardanelles or the Suez Canal; for colonial pickings to buy cheap in and conquered markets to sell dear in. War is capitalism with the gloves off.Collection: War
We must be born with an intuition of mortality.Collection: Intuition
You can persuade a man to believe almost anything provided he is clever enough, but it is much more difficult to persuade someone less clever.Collection: Clever
For 10 years of my life, 3 times a day, I thanked the Lord for what I was about to receive and thanked him again for what I had just received, and then we lost touch and I suddenly thought, where is he nowCollection: Life
Theater is a recreation. It can be much more, but unless it's recreation, I don't see the point of it.Collection: Theater
On Broadway, only the fire doors separate you from the sidewalk and you're lucky if the sound of a police car doesn't rip the envelope twice a night.Collection: Rip
Plays...Maidens aspiring to Godheads and vice versa!Collection: Play
Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don't value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last.Collection: Children
One bulls-eye and you're rich and famous. The rich get more famous and the famous get rich. You're the talk of the town....The sense of so much depending on success is very hard to ignore, perhaps impossible. It leads to disproportionate anxiety and disproportionate relief or disappointment.Collection: Disappointment
If you were handed power on a plate you'd be left fighting over a plate.Collection: Fighting
It would have been nice to have had unicorns.Collection: Nice