Quotes by Tom Stoppard

“Years and years ago, there was a production of The Tempest, out of doors, at an Oxford college on a lawn, which was the stage, and the lawn went back towards the lake in the grounds of the college,...”

“I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impul...”

“I think... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process.”

“When you write, it's making a certain kind of music in your head. There's a rhythm to it, a pulse, and on the whole, I'm writing to that drum rather than the psychological process.”

“I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.”

“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.”

“It is easily and often overlooked that when Thomas Jefferson asserted that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were inalienable human rights, he did so on the ground that they had been endow...”

“My intention still is to write a play to commemorate, possibly rather skeptically, the 50th anniversary of the Russian revolution. I started it at the beginning of 1966, but confronted with the eno...”

“Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.”

“For me, human rights simply endorse a view of life and a set of moral values that are perfectly clear to an eight-year-old child. A child knows what is fair and isn't fair, and justice derives from...”

“I write out of my intellectual experience.”

“I feel that when I began writing, I had a need to know more about the play before I got into it. I think that's the way I was thinking. But my actual experience is that the best way to find out wha...”

“In January 1962, when I was the author of one and a half unperformed plays, I attended a student production of 'The Birthday Party' at the Victoria Rooms in Bristol. Just before it began, I realise...”

“I'm a playwright who gets involved in movies when I'm not writing a play.”

“I don't act, I don't direct, I don't design.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Every exit is an entry somewhere else.”

“It's not the voting that's democracy it's the counting. ”

“I want to support the whole idea of the humanities and teaching the humanities as being something that - even if it can't be quantitatively measured as other subjects - it's as fundamental to all e...”