Quotes by 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 can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for yo...”

“Although I don't examine myself in this respect, I would say, off the top of my head, that I've come to acknowledge my Czechness more as I get older.”

“When I was 20, the idea of having a play on anywhere was just beyond my dreams.”

“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.”

“We're actors — we're the opposite of people!”

“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....”

“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 c...”

“When I was twelve I was obsessed. Everything was sex. Latin was sex. The dictionary fell open at 'meretrix', a harlot. You could feel the mystery coming off the word like musk. 'Meretrix'! This was...”

“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.”

“The trouble is, I can't find a part of myself where you're not important. I write in order to be worth your while and to finance the way I want to live with you. Not the way you want to live. The w...”

“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 ...”

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

“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...”

“Schelling's God is the totality of Nature struggling towards consciousness, and Man is as far as the struggle has got, with the animals not too far behind, vegetables somewhat lagging, and rocks no...”

“Being a person is respect, because you're not a cat or a dog or a bunch of tulips, you're a human person and humanness isn't like something there can be different amounts of, it's maxed out from th...”

“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.”

“Seduced her? Every time I turned round she was up a library ladder. In the end I gave in. That reminds me—I spotted something between her legs that made me think of you.”

“Carnal embrace is sexual congress, which is the insertion of the male genital organ into the female genital organ for purposes of procreation and pleasure. Fermat’s last theorem, by contrast, asser...”

“Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef.”