Tom Stoppard: Likeness

Tom Stoppard is British playwright. Explore interesting quotes on likeness.

Tom Stoppard: 232 quotes9 likes

“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.”

“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

“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

“A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar— you pretend it's not there.”

Misattributed <br class="br">Source: Darryl Hannah http://www.idolpleasures.com/daryl_hannah.shtml.

“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.”

Tom Stoppard Night and Day

Milne, Act I
Night and Day (1978)

“I'm showing an interest in your work. I thought you liked me showing an interest in your work. My showing. Save the gerund and screw the whale.”

Tom Stoppard The Real Thing

Max, Act I, scene I
The Real Thing (1982)

“The days of the digitals are numbered. The metaphor is built into them like a self-destruct mechanism.”

Tom Stoppard The Real Thing

Max, Act I, scene I.
Often misquoted as "The days of the digital watch are numbered."
The Real Thing (1982)

“This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It's for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you've done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly. What we're trying to do is to write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might…travel.”

Tom Stoppard The Real Thing

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

“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.”

Tom Stoppard Travesties

Carr, Act I
Travesties (1974)

“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)