Quotes by Tom Stoppard

“Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the e...”

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

“I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.”

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

“Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.”

“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.”

“The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devicesafter a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people's.”

“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-...”

“Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Valentine....”

“What freedom means, is being allowed to sing in my bath as loudly as will not interfere with my neighbour's freedom to sing a different tune in his.”

“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.”

“He's never known anything like it! But then, he has never known anything to write home about, so this is nothing to write home about. ”

“GUIL: It [Hamlet's madness] really boils down to symptoms. Pregnant replies, mystic allusions, mistaken identities, arguing his father is his mother, that sort of thing; intimations of suicide, for...”

“Chater: You dare to call me that. I demand satisfaction!Septimus: Mrs Chater demanded satisfaction and now you are demanding satisfaction. I cannot spend my time day and night satisfying the demand...”

“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 y...”

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.”

“Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.”

“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.”

“A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling...”