110+ Tom Stoppard Quotes On Friendship, Razzle And Broadway

Tom Stoppard is an English playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. He is best known for his plays, which often explore the philosophical and intellectual concerns of the modern world, and his works often draw on a wide range of cultural and historical references. His best-known works include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Arcadia, and Jumpers. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Tom Stoppard on love, friendship, life.

Top 10 Tom Stoppard Quotes

1. Every exit is an entry somewhere else.
2. 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.
3. Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
4. It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.
5. A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.
6. Words are sacred. If you get the right ones in the right order you can nudge the world a little.
7. 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.
8. If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.
9. Give us this day our daily mask.
10. Every exit is an entry somewhere.

Tom Stoppard Image Quotes

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

Tom Stoppard Short Quotes

• Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.
• It would have been nice to have had unicorns.
• It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
• Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.
• It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.
• The tragedy of journalism is that these are people doing their best work.
• It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing.
• Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.
• It takes character to withstand the rigours of indolence.
• I read for interest and enjoyment, and when I cease to enjoy it I stop.

Tom Stoppard Quotes About Love

A genuine love of learning is one of the two delinquencies which cause blindness and lead a young man to ruin. — Tom Stoppard

I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really. — Tom Stoppard

War is capitalism with the gloves off and many who go to war know it but they go to war because they don't want to be a hero. — Tom Stoppard

I love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it. I love the way it blurs the distinction between everyone who isn't one's lover. — Tom Stoppard

I really love being in postproduction. First of all, it's all quite self-interested: You can protect things. — Tom Stoppard

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. — Tom Stoppard

Before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself. — Tom Stoppard

The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy. — Tom Stoppard

It's no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst. — Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard Quotes About Life

My life feels, week to week, incomplete to the level of being pointless if I am not in preparation for the next play or, ideally, into it. — Tom Stoppard

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. — Tom Stoppard

Obviously, you would give your life for your children, or give them the last biscuit on the plate. But to me, the trick in life is to take that sense of generosity between kin, make it apply to the extended family and to your neighbour, your village and beyond. — Tom Stoppard

If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that. But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life. — Tom Stoppard

All mystical experience is coincidence; and vice versa, of course. — Tom Stoppard

Biography is the mesh through which real life escapes. — Tom Stoppard

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. — Tom Stoppard

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

Life is a gamble at terrible odds, if it were a bet, you would not take it. — Tom Stoppard

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

Tom Stoppard Quotes About Price

Age is a high price to pay for maturity. — Tom Stoppard

Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up. — Tom Stoppard

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity. — Tom Stoppard

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

Tom Stoppard Quotes About Terrible

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

Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end? — Tom Stoppard

Death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought. — Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody. — Tom Stoppard

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. — Tom Stoppard

Maybe Napoleon was wrong when he said we were a nation of shopkeepers... Today England looked like a nation of goalkeepers. — Tom Stoppard

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. — Tom Stoppard

When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd? — Tom Stoppard

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

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen. — Tom Stoppard

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. — Tom Stoppard

The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks. — Tom Stoppard

Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over... Death is not anything... death is not... It's the absence of presence, nothing more... the endless time of never coming back... a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes not sound. — Tom Stoppard

When I think of how things could have turned out, I feel as if I've dodged, not just bullets, but 6mm shells. — Tom Stoppard

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

I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus. — Tom Stoppard

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

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

I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation. — Tom Stoppard

How the hell do I know what I find incredible? Credibility is an expanding field... Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight. — Tom Stoppard

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

We're actors. We're the opposite of people. — Tom Stoppard

I think theater ought to be theatrical ... you know, shuffling the pack in different ways so that it's -- there's always some kind of ambush involved in the experience. You're being ambushed by an unexpected word, or by an elephant falling out of the cupboard, whatever it is. — Tom Stoppard

Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever. It must have been shattering, stamped into one’s memory. And yet, I can’t remember it. — Tom Stoppard

From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts. — Tom Stoppard

In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness. — Tom Stoppard

Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight. — Tom Stoppard

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

Underneath runs the main current of preoccupation, which is keeping one's nose clean at all times. This means that when things go wrong you have to pass the blame along the line, like pass-the-parcel, till the music stops. — Tom Stoppard

There is truth and falsehood in a comma. — Tom Stoppard

Audiences know what to expect, and that is all that they are prepared to believe in. — Tom Stoppard

We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there's only one direction. And time is its only measure. — Tom Stoppard

What a fine persecution—to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened. — Tom Stoppard

We've traveled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation. — Tom Stoppard

One of the nice things about the world of filmmaking is that you make friends in the business. — Tom Stoppard

I'm the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal and rebut the refutation. Endlessly. — Tom Stoppard

What did you have in mind? A short, blunt human pyramid? — Tom Stoppard

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. — Tom Stoppard

The truth is always a compound of two half- truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say. — Tom Stoppard

We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style. — Tom Stoppard

We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see. — Tom Stoppard

Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society. — Tom Stoppard

Rewriting isn't just about dialogue, it's the order of the scenes, how you finish a scene, how you get into a scene. All these final decisions are best made when you're there, watching. It's really enjoyable, but you've got to be there at the director's invitation. You can't just barge in and say, "I'm the writer." — Tom Stoppard

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. — Tom Stoppard

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. — Tom Stoppard

We must be born with an intuition of mortality. — Tom Stoppard

The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is. — Tom Stoppard

Rosencrantz: Shouldn't we be doing something--constructive? Guildenstern: What did you have in mind? ... A short, blunt human pyramid...? — Tom Stoppard

There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it. — Tom Stoppard

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. — Tom Stoppard

I should have the courage of my lack of convictions. — Tom Stoppard

If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could. — Tom Stoppard

Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins. — Tom Stoppard

Theater is still a medium which attracts young writers. You'd think that it would be all over by now, with television and film. But it's not. — Tom Stoppard

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. — Tom Stoppard

Between "just desserts" and "tragic irony" we are given quite a lot of scope for our particular talent. Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go when things have got about as bad as they reasonably get. — Tom Stoppard

Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. — Tom Stoppard

If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice. — Tom Stoppard

Each move is dictated by the previous one--that is the meaning of order — Tom Stoppard

I smoke too much whether it's going well or badly. After all these years, I definitely associate having a pen in my hand with having an ashtray just out of eye line. — Tom Stoppard

Hell is very likely to be modernization infinitely extended. — Tom Stoppard

Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art. — Tom Stoppard

Pirates could happen to anyone. — Tom Stoppard

It was a different planet in 1967, the Broadway theatre. It had a little ashtray clamped to the back of every seat and the author got 10% of the gross. — Tom Stoppard

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

Writing a play is like smashing that [glass] ashtray, filming it in slow motion, and then running the film in reverse, so that the fragments of rubble appear to fly together. You start - or at least I start - with the rubble. — Tom Stoppard

For all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure. — Tom Stoppard

Your opinions are your symptoms. — Tom Stoppard

You are an over-excited little man, with a need for self-expression far beyond the scope of your natural gifts. This is not discreditable. Neither does it make you an artist. — Tom Stoppard

We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now. — Tom Stoppard

Uncertainty is the normal state. — Tom Stoppard

No problem is insoluble, given a big enough plastic bag. — Tom Stoppard

Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn't death! You scream and choke and sink to your knees but it doesn't bring death home to anyone- it doesn't catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says- 'One day you are going to die. — Tom Stoppard

Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway. Guildenstern: What? Rosencrantz: England. Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then? — Tom Stoppard

If rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans! — Tom Stoppard

The days of the digitals are numbered. The metaphor is built into them like a self-destruct mechanism. — Tom Stoppard

A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security. — Tom Stoppard

the natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. strangely enough it all works out in the end... it's a mystery. — Tom Stoppard

...reality, the name we give to the common experience. — Tom Stoppard

Life Lessons by Tom Stoppard

1. Tom Stoppard teaches us to think critically and question the status quo, encouraging us to challenge the norms of society and push for progress.
2. He also emphasizes the importance of understanding the complexities of life and recognizing that there are often no easy answers.
3. Finally, Stoppard reminds us to embrace our creativity and use it to explore and express our ideas, feelings, and experiences.