Tom Stoppard: Trending quotes

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Tom Stoppard: 232 quotes9 likes

“(Falls down in a drunken stupor): Let's sit down.”

Tom Stoppard

Ogarev.
The Coast of Utopia: Salvage (2002)

“My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.”

Tom Stoppard

Source: Lord Malquist and Mr Moon (1966), Ch. 2: A Couple of Deaths and Exits.

“The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe — responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.”

Tom Stoppard

This is a reference to a quote of Rudyard Kipling, "Power without responsibility — the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages," which became widely known after being quoted by prime minister Stanley Baldwin in a speech of 1931-03-17.
Source: Lord Malquist and Mr Moon (1966), Ch. 6: An Honourable Death

“The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.”

Tom Stoppard Night and Day

Ruth, Act I
Night and Day (1978)

“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. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?”

Tom Stoppard Arcadia

Septimus, Act I
Arcadia (1993)

“Turgenev: The names for things don't come first. Words stagger after, hopelessly trying to become the sensation.”

Tom Stoppard

The Coast of Utopia: Shipwreck (2002)

“I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.”

Tom Stoppard

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

“I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.”

Tom Stoppard

Source: Interview, The Guardian (London, 1988-03-18).

“When Harold Pinter was lobbying to have London's Comedy Theatre renamed the Pinter Theatre, Stoppard wrote back: "Have you thought, instead, of changing your name to Harold Comedy?"”

Tom Stoppard

Interviews and profiles <br class="br">Source: William Langley, &quot;Profile: Sir Tom Stoppard,&quot; The Telegraph (2006-11-06) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;jsessionid=W4GGMOS2UYBMJQFIQMFSFFWAVCBQ0IV0?xml=/opinion/2006/06/11/do1107.xml

“Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.”

Tom Stoppard

Misattributed
Source: Elbert Hubbard, "J.B. Runs Things," Short Stories and Index: Elbert Hubbard's Selected Writings, Part 14 (1923) [Kessinger Publishing, 1998, ISBN 0766103978], p. 278.

“Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering; the capacity for self-indulgence changes hands.”

Tom Stoppard

Source: Lord Malquist and Mr Moon (1966), Ch. I: Dramatis Personae and Other Coincidences.

“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.”

Tom Stoppard Jumpers

George, Act I
Jumpers (1972)

“Milne: No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.
Ruth: I'm with you on the free press. It's the newspapers I can't stand.”

Tom Stoppard Night and Day

Act I
Night and Day (1978)

“I learned three things in Zurich during the war. I wrote them down. Firstly, you're either a revolutionary or you're not, and if you're not you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can't be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary. … I forget the third thing.”

Tom Stoppard Travesties

Carr, Act II.
Travesties (1974)

“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.”

Tom Stoppard Travesties

Joyce, Act I
Stoppard called this "the most important" speech in the play
Source: Travesties (1974)

“Wake me up for breakfast, if I'm not dead.”

Tom Stoppard The Coast of Utopia

Turgenev
The Coast of Utopia: Salvage (2002)