Tom Stoppard Quotes

“I love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it. I love the way it blurs the distinction between everyone who isn't one's lover.”

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

“We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”

Source: The Real Thing

“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.”

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

“Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead.”

Tom Stoppard Quotes about life

Tom Stoppard book Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“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.”

Tom Stoppard book Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“Success in life is to maintain this ecstasy, to burn always with this hard gemlike flame.”

Tom Stoppard The Invention of Love

Source: The Invention of Love

“Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it.”

“If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.”

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

“I never got used to the way the house Trots fell into the jargon back in Grimsby — I mean, on any other subject, like the death of the novel, or the sex life of the editor's secretary, they spoke ordinary English, but as soon as they started trying to get me to join the strike it was as if their brains had been taken out and replaced by one of those little golf-ball things you get in electric typewriters… "Betrayal"… "Confrontation"… "Management"… My God, you'd need a more supple language than that to describe an argument between two amoebas.”

Misattributed
Source: Margaret Mead, quoted in "Growing Old in America: An Introduction with Margaret Mead" by Grace Hechinger, Family Circle (1977-07-26), p. 27.

Tom Stoppard Night and Day

Milne, Act I
Night and Day (1978)

Tom Stoppard: Trending quotes

“Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?”

Tom Stoppard book Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“It is a defect of God's humour that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.”

“Alexander: I myself was educated in Italy. My doctorate in philosophy is from the University of Padua.
Renne: Really? Philosophy?
Alexander: My dissertation was on worms.
Renne: Worms the philosopher?
Alexander: No, just worms.
Renne: Ah, the philosophy of worms.
Alexander: Not at all. Worms have no philosophy, as far as is known.”

Lady Croom, Act II
Source: Arcadia (1993)

“An artist is the magician put among men to gratify — capriciously — their urge for immortality.”

The Coast of Utopia: Voyage (2002)

Tom Stoppard Quotes

Tom Stoppard Travesties

Joyce, Act I
Stoppard called this "the most important" speech in the play.
Travesties (1974)
Context: An artist is the magician put among men to gratify — capriciously — their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships — and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes — husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer.

“Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.”

Tom Stoppard book Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“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.”

“Pirates could happen to anyone.”

Henry, Act II, scene V
Source: The Real Thing (1982)
Context: Buddy Holly was twenty-two. Think of what he might have gone on to achieve. 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.

“We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.”

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

“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.”

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Tom Stoppard book Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“Words, words. They're all we have to go on.”

Tom Stoppard book Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.”

Tom Stoppard Rock 'n' Roll

Source: Rock 'n' Roll

“Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?”

Tom Stoppard book Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody.”

Tom Stoppard book Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“What a fine persecution—to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.”

Tom Stoppard book Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“It would have been nice to have had unicorns.”

Tom Stoppard book Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“It's no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst.”

“It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.”

Tom Stoppard Jumpers

Dotty, Act I
Source: Jumpers (1972)

“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.”

“… reality, the name we give to the common experience.”

Henry, Act II, scene V
Source: The Real Thing (1982)

“Donner: Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.”

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

“Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.”

Source: Artist Descending a Staircase (1972)

“When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.”

“It's the wanting to know that makes us matter.”

Source: Arcadia

“Rosencrantz: Shouldn't we be doing something--constructive?
Guildenstern: What did you have in mind?… A short, blunt human pyramid…?”

Hannah, Act II.
Source: Arcadia (1993)

Tom Stoppard book Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?”

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.”

Source: Arcadia

“I'm going to be dead before I read the books I'm going to read.”

“The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.”

“It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”

Source: Arcadia

“For all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.”

Source: Arcadia

Tom Stoppard book Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“Give us this day our daily mask.”

Tom Stoppard book Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“Audiences know what to expect, and that is all that they are prepared to believe in.”

Tom Stoppard book Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.”

“Uncertainty is the normal state.”

Tom Stoppard book Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.”

“Each move is dictated by the previous one--that is the meaning of order”

1920s, Prejudices, Third Series (1922)

Tom Stoppard book Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.”

“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.”

Source: Arcadia

Tom Stoppard book Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“You can't treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires.”

Tom Stoppard book Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“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.”

Tom Stoppard book Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“An essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.”

Tom Stoppard Travesties

Carr, Act I
Source: Travesties (1974)

“Septimus. When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be all alone, on an empty shore.

Thomasina. Then we will dance. Is this a waltz?”

“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.”

Act II
Source: Arcadia (1993)

“Well, we'll know better next time.”

Source: Arcadia

Tom Stoppard book Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“I've lost all capacity for disbelief. I'm not sure that I could even rise to a little gentle scepticism.”

Tom Stoppard book Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.”

“Public postures have the configuration of private derangement.”

“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. It takes courage to sit down and be counted.”

Henry, Act I, scene II
The Real Thing (1982)

Tom Stoppard Travesties

Tzara, Act I
Travesties (1974)

“Dotty: Archie says the Church is a monument to irrationality.
George: … The National Gallery is a monument to irrationality! Every concert hall is a monument to irrationality! — and so is a nicely kept garden, or a lover's favour, or a home for stray dogs! You stupid woman, if rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!”

Tom Stoppard Jumpers

Act I
Jumpers (1972)

“Mageeba: Do you know what I mean by a relatively free press, Mr. Wagner?
Wagner: Not exactly, sir, no.
Mageeba: I mean a free press which is edited by one of my relatives.”

Tom Stoppard Night and Day

Act II.
Night and Day (1978)

“I began my talk by saying that I had not written my plays for purposes of discussion. At once, I felt a ripple of panic run through the hall. I suddenly realised why. To everyone present, discussion was the whole point of drama. That was why the faculty had been endowed — that was why all those buildings had been put up! I had undermined the entire reason for their existence.”

“If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.”

"Tom Stoppard," profile by Kenneth Tynan, The New Yorker (1977-12-19).
Interviews and profiles

“My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.”

Misattributed
Source: Abraham Sutzkever (born 1913), quoted in "Yiddish Poet Celebrates Life with His Language" by Joseph Berger, The New York Times (1985-03-17), Section 1, page 38.