Author

The notion that the 'leader' has the right to ask huge sacrifices of your generation for a notional future paradise - if you'd be good enough to lie down under the wheels of the juggernaut - that sentimental and self-aggrandising rationalisation for brute force and cowardice I felt from adolescence was wrong.

From Tom Stoppard

The idea that anybody might be allowed to use their common sense when clearly no harm is being done is part of history now.

From Tom Stoppard

Corporeal death is not the whole story.

From 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 you when you're dead.

From Tom Stoppard

When 'The Dark Side of the Moon' was a new album in 1973, a friend of mine walked into my room where I was working with a copy in his hand and said, 'You really have to do a play about this album.'

From Tom Stoppard

Even when the writing seems very frivolous, I'm puritanical. I don't mean my subject matter. It's that I'm almost pathologically incapable of leaving something when I'm not quite happy with it.

From Tom Stoppard

My desk faces the water, and I'm perfectly happy sitting there. I'm never lonely.

From Tom Stoppard

I don't do interviews under false pretenses.

From Tom Stoppard

The text loses its virginity simply by being staged: it's no longer the abstract ideal version; it's an event.

From Tom Stoppard

In the period before the arrival of Mrs. Thatcher, politics had been in such low esteem. Everything was so hedged, so mealy-mouthed. Then along came this woman who seemed to have no manners at all and said exactly what she thought. Everyone's eyes were popping and their jaws were dropping, and I really enjoyed that.

From Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard

Notable Quotes

Authors with Similar Views

Terry Teachout

Wallace Shawn

Theresa Rebeck

Lydia Davis

David Mamet

Authors with Opposing Views

Rodman Philbrick

Terry Teachout

Christopher Hitchens

David Mamet

Holland Taylor