Tom Stoppard Quotes

26 quotations by Tom Stoppard

We're actors. We're the opposite of people.

We give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain.

The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.

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.

The days of the digital watch are numbered.

The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.

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.

Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.

Life is a gamble, at terrible odds - if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.

Life in a box is better than no life at all... I expect.

James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.

It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

It is better to be quotable than to be honest.

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

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.

I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

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

Good things, when short, are twice as good.

Get me inside any boardroom and I'll get any decision I want.

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

Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.

Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power.

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

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