Tom Stoppard Quotes

"Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art."
-Tom Stoppard in Imagination quotes.

"We are tied down to a language that makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style."
-Tom Stoppard

"If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older."
-Tom Stoppard in Childhood quotes.

"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

"We're actors - we're the opposite of people."
-Tom Stoppard in Acting quotes.

"I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. 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."
-Tom Stoppard

"It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting."
-Tom Stoppard in Democracy quotes.

"It is better to be quotable than to be honest."
-Tom Stoppard in Quotations quotes.

"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 in Truth quotes.

"It is an interesting view of atheism, as a sort of "crutch" for those who can't stand the reality of God."
-Tom Stoppard in Religion quotes.

"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

"I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity."
-Tom Stoppard in Age quotes.

"If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music... and of aviation."
-Tom Stoppard

"My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers."
-Tom Stoppard in Questioning quotes.

"Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering."
-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 no sound..."
-Tom Stoppard

"Rosencrantz: 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

"The days of the digital watch are numbered."
-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's like being ambushed by a grotesque."
-Tom Stoppard