100 Insightful Quotes By Tom Stoppard For The Aficionados
Sir Tom Stoppard is an eminent Czech-British screenwriter and playwright. He has written profusely for stage, radio, TV, and film. He gained stature with plays like ‘Every Good Boy Deserves Favour,’ ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,’ ‘Arcadia,’ ‘The Real Thing,’ ‘The Invention of Love,’ ‘Professional Foul,’ ‘The Coast of Utopia,’ and ‘Travesties.’ He bagged in four ‘Tony Awards’ and one ‘Academy Award’ for his writings. His works encompass themes of political freedom, human rights, and censorships. Besides being one of the most performed dramatists of his generation across the globe, he is also an illustrious playwright of the ‘National Theatre.’ Following are some of the noted quotes by Tom Stoppard, which have been gathered from his writings, plays, tweets, interviews, public utterances, books, novels, and films. Go through quotes by Tom Stoppard that will keep you focused.
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.
It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.
Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.
There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.
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.
We're actors — we're the opposite of people!
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.
Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway. Guildenstern: What? Rosencrantz: England. Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?
Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it.
Pirates could happen to anyone.
Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?
We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.
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.
Words, words. They're all we have to go on.
I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.
The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody.
What a fine persecution—to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.
Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?
It's no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst.
It would have been nice to have had unicorns.
It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
...reality, the name we give to the common experience.
Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.
What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?
Rosencrantz: Shouldn't we be doing something--constructive? Guildenstern: What did you have in mind? ... A short, blunt human pyramid...?
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 wanting to know that makes us matter.
