Tom Stoppard Quotes: 15

• I was an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values against which art could be measured. I didn't trust my own subjective responses.

• Success is a sort of metaphysical experience. I live exactly as I did before - only on a slightly bigger scale. Naturally, I won't be corrupted. I'll sit there in my Rolls, uncorrupted, and tell my chauffeur, uncorruptedly, where to go.

• Because theatre is a story-telling art form, we feel entitled to assume that the playwright got there before we got there.

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

  Arcadia

• We're actors — we're the opposite of people!

  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

• I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.

  Rock 'n' Roll

• Rosencrantz: We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat?Guildenstern: No, no, no... Death is...not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not-be on a boat.Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats.Guildenstern: No, no, no--what you've been is not on boats.

  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

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

  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

• 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.

  The Real Thing: A Play

• Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

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

  Arcadia

• If knowledge isn't self-knowledge it isn't doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing 'When Father Painted the Parlour'? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you. 'She walks into beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that's best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.

  Arcadia

• Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.

• It's where we're nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it's for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn't matter where on what, it's the light itself, against the darkness, it's what's left of God's purpose when you take away God.

  The Invention of Love

• Real data is messy. ...It's all very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it's playing your song, but unfortunately it's out of whack, some of the strings are missing, and the pianist is tone deaf and drunk- I mean, the noise! Impossible!